Red-footed Booby

[Geoff Malosh]

In January I spent a week on the island of Kaua'i. The seabirds at Kilauea Point were without a doubt the highlight of the trip. Maybe not as fun as Midway but I won't complain :-)

The nesting areas for seabirds on Kaua'i are of course inaccessible but with some patience it's pretty easy to make good in-flight images of Red-footed Booby, Laysan Albatross, White-tailed and Red-tailed tropicbirds, and Great Frigatebird at Kilauea. (Red-taileds are only there in season and I was there about a month too early.)

This was my favorite image of Red-footed Booby. By the last day I had made many classic horizontal images I was satisfied with so I decided to flip the camera to the vertical and try for images such as this one. In the original frame the bird was far to the left, so I added some canvas to the left and cropped from the right to reposition the bird.

Canon 50D, 500mm f/4L +1.4x, 1/1600 at f/8 (added +1/3 in post-processing), ISO 320, evaluative, manual exp., tripod.

Thanks for looking.

[Paul Lagasi]

Geoff, this is a very nice image, colors, sharpness, wing position, verticle comp, slight head turn...It might be a little tight in the frame for me. You must have had a great time seeing these birds, except for Red-tailed Tropicbird, they're all life birds.
Thanks for sharing

[Tony Whitehead]

Well done, Geoff. Lovely flight image - blue BG works well. Attitude of the head showing the colours is great.

[Doug Brown]

Good looking bird, and a photograph that does it justice. Very nice exposure and sharpness. Nice head angle. Enjoyed your story too.

[Nancy A Elwood]

Geoff well done! Love the pose and the BG. Sounds like a TERRIFIC trip!

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

I wouldn't have guessed this was done from a tripod. Great job. Very good exposure control....whites look perfect to me. Nice clean image with strong composition.