A Day at Nickerson Beach with Morris

I had the pleasure of shooting with Morris a couple of weeks ago in Long Island. We started off at the Marine Nature Study Area then finished up at Nickerson Beach. It was the same day Morris got the amazing sequence of shots of a black skimmer chick being chased down by an adult skimmer (who was clearly not the mom or dad...unless the chick was being punished!). Here's Morris's thread:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4668852#forum-post-66444823

A huge thank you to Morris for helping me with BIF camera settings, first on my X-T3 then on the X-H2s, as well as great tips out in the field!

Here's a selection of shots from that afternoon/early evening.

Steve

1) Great White Heron - you win some...

2) ...you lose some

3) I loved this juvenile Green Heron's colors

4) Now for the fun stuff with Black Skimmers

5) anyone seen this little guy's mom?

6) sort of looks like Morris's little chick that was screaming for help (but it's a different one)

7) I'm a sucker for SIF (Skimmers In Flight)

8) a bit too close for comfort

I was standing just outside of a protected dune area and this and another skimmer were repeatedly circling and heading straight at me, then diving to the side at the last second. This is a 3000 x 3000 crop with my 150-600 zoomed almost all the way out (199mm). In other words, this guy was probably inside of 10 feet when this was taken and just before it pulled off to the side.

Camera and focus settings were pretty much straight off of Morris's suggestions, though I shot the skimmers at "only" 20 fps as I didn't want to have to deal with the huge volume of images to review if I had shot at 40 fps. As it was, I had 2,000 images to process from this outing, twice what I would normally shoot.

C&C welcomed.

Steve