Dave Hartley

On our recent trip to Belize, we spent two and a half days at Half Moon Caye. This is owned by the Belize Audubon Society and is a sanctuary for Red-Footed Boobies and Frigate Birds. Each morning, the Audubon residents would check the sanctuary to see if any chicks had fallen out of their nests. The adult birds will not tend to these chicks and so the birds are rescued, raised and eventually released into the wild. When we visited, there were two chicks that had been rescued and these hung out by the resident accommodation. We went to photograph the two chicks but the photographic environment was not optimal to say the least. One chick was hanging out by the building with the other standing on the building steps. To make matters worse, the background was a mixture of wooden building and bright background caused by the fact that the building was raised. The picture below gives you an idea of what we saw when we first turned up.

At first I thought there was no decent shot in the current setting but decided to take a few shots anyway. Looking through the view finder, I originally tried to put the dark part of the background behind the chicks head but had trouble getting the right composition. Then I noticed the pleasing blue background which was the out of focus sea. I then changed my angle to put the blue background behind the chicks head and played around with various compositions. The picture at the top of the post shows the result of changing my angle and working the subject.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.