Jekyll Island in Spring!
Back in January, Ray and I visited Jekyll Island, Georgia. We had such an amazing time while we were there that we booked a little trip for April. We thought it would be nice to experience the island in warmer weather and also see what birds might be around during a different season. We had the intention of shooting a lot of shorebirds at Driftwood Beach because it is such a unique and beautiful environment. Although the beach is stunningly scenic, for whatever reason that beach doesn’t seem to be ideal for the birds. We visited on various occasions and only saw a handful of willets, and a couple of gulls. We did check out another beach on the island where all the shorebirds seem to congregate. Instead of focusing all our attention on the shorebirds, we decided to do a couple of outings looking for songbirds and warblers as well.
Our first evening on the beach, I shot using the 28-400 lens. I was really impressed with the quality of the images I was able to capture with this lens and the versatility of the focal range. It was fun and challenging to photograph willets in the sea foam and with the habitat features. I believe that sea foam adds a nice dreamy texture and feel to the images. After our initial evening shoot and feeling slightly disappointed in the number of birds on the beach, we decided to try for songbirds and warblers the next morning. Springtime is my favorite time of year. All the flowers are in bloom and the songbirds are singing! I don’t particularly enjoy shooting songbirds as much as I enjoy shorebirds, however mixing in some different lenses helps to spark my creativity. I tried using our 75 millimeter manual focus lens which creates a “swirly” bokeh effect as well as shooting with the 250mm donut bokeh lens. I found that 75 mm and 135 mm seemed really challenging as a focal length, but that the 250mm actually seemed ideal to be able to include some of the beautiful Jekyll Island environment with Spanish moss dripping from giant oak trees.
