I’ve been doing some work on photographing puffins in the Kodiak area. Trying develop a set up that will work from the water. Puffins are very skittish and easily disturbed when approached from land. Many of the puffin shots you see in magazines were taken from blinds. This causes disturbance initial until the birds get used to the blind. This allows you to get very close to a hand full of birds who are at their nest for a limited time in the morning and evening. The down side is you are locked into a couple of shot angels and if weather/lighting isn’t perfect when the birds are there you walk away empty handed.
My hope was for a simpler lighter setup that would allow me to move to several different locations and shoot the birds from the water (where they are less skittish). I also wanted to get some shots of the birds taking off on the water. The closer to the water you get the better subject isolation you can achieve. So here is what I came up with: My normal tripod, with an Induro GHBA gimbal head placed between my legs in the kayak. With minimal adjustment I could put the camera at a comfortable height. The gimbal head allowed for smooth panning and made compensating for the motion of the boat easier. Here is what it looked like:
300mm 2.8 Lens on Gimbal head in Kayak.
This ended up working quite well. The birds were more curious than afraid and would allow me to get quite close. When I wanted to move I could just lay the lens over my shoulder and paddle around, then clip the paddle in and start shooting. Here are some of the results:
Tufted Puffin
Pelagic Cormorants
While photographing the puffins I was surprised to see a group of parakeet auklets approach me. I have only seen them a couple of times while walking the beaches in Dutch Harbor. This group was particularly friendly and made for some very cute shots.
Parakeet Auklets
Finally the wind started to pickup and photographing birds on the cliffs got too difficult. I moved out a bit and tried to get some shots of puffins on the wing. The technique that worked the best was to paddle up wind and let myself drift into a flock of birds. This had several benefits; it allowed me to approach them with out paddling, which tends to scare them. Second, the kayak turns sideways when drifting and made for a more stable/predictable platform. Lastly, when the puffins finally decided to take flight they always fly into the wind, thus closing the distance even more. At the last minute they would turn and pass me on the side.
Tufted puffin in flight
Tufted puffin on the wing
All in all an excellent day on the water. No camera gear went for a swim and I got lots of good shots. I have to say that post-processing was a challenge. You can expose for the bright white head and loose the body to shadows or expose for the body and blow out the highlights in on their heads, its a no win situation. In the end I exposed for the body and used some dogging to get detail back in the head.