For my girlfriends birthday I decided to take her on a long weekend to Santa Barbara (she had been wanting to take a mini vacation for a while and I had never been to SB before!). We drove down the coast on CA-1 and had a gorgeous 7 hour drive from SF and arrived late on Friday. We had dinner reservations but had some time to kill and decided to walk down the wharf.
On our way back from the wharf we noticed this Pelican was standing perfectly still as if it had planned on modeling for me the entire time. It sat there for a long time while all the tourists, obviously including myself, snapped away. It actually let me get pretty close without being bothered.
My D700 had just arrived a day earlier and I hadn’t really had a chance to play with it yet so this was one of my first photos with the new camera! The D700 was able to get some great detail in the Pelican feathers. The one thing I did notice about the D700 though, is that the 70mm end of my 24-70mm lens is no longer ”zoomy” enough for some things. I wanted to be able to zoom in even more when I took this photo (since I didn’t want to get too close to the Pelican). This is a crop of the original framing.
Nikon D700 w/Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S:
58mm, f/3.5, 1/500 sec, ISO 400, Handheld
