About the Image(s)

This was taken when cruising between the British Virgin Islands and St Lucia on 20 January. It was a day when we had a lot of flying fish avoiding the ship (as last month) and up to 20 Brown Booby birds staying for a few hours.

The shot everyone wants from this situation is a bird with a fish in its mouth. So you start shooting when you see one dive in, hoping you have chosen one who is good at fishing as well as it returning to the surface with its fish with its head clear in your direction. So it’s a lottery! Most miss their fish.

One takes hundreds of shots - sometimes deleting them all. But on this occasion, I could see that one bird was successfully, but was being chased by other birds which wanted the prize! I kept shooting. This was the moment when the successful bird lost its prize to the top/right aggressor. I have a couple of earlier shots which have chasing action clear.

Settings - taken with Olympus gear, OM-1 and 150-400 f4.5 lens at 367mm (so 734 FF) 1/2,000 at f4.5 and 320 ISO. I was taking at 10ps which is the highest using mechanical shutter with AF between each.

PP in Lightroom and Topaz Photo Ai. I struggled to control the light water drops and fish edge, despite exposure compensation at -0.7.