Black Skimmer Panorama

Work has kept me away from posting new blogs lately, but I am back with a panorama made from 9 images taken at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, Brigantine Division, in Oceanville NJ. We went down to look for Ospreys and Black Skimmers and we found both. The Ospreys were all over the refuge and quite active. We got quite a few photos, but we did not find the Black Skimmers until we got near the end of the Wildlife Drive. They were just resting there in a large group. We decided to keep an eye on them for later in the day and see if they would be fishing.  When we first found them, I decided to shoot a series of handheld shots to make a long thin panorama showing the large group while they were still there in large numbers. Doing this is fairly easy, but change to manual exposure so the exposures are consistent and make sure if you are not using a tripod, to keep the images level and lined up with plenty of overlapping between images. I assembled the panorama manually in Photoshop, but you can also let Photoshop make them for you or use a program like PT Gui. I keep a couple of Terns and Black-headed Gulls in the shot to keep balance. I tried counting a few times, but I kept getting a different count each time, but there is about 75 in this group. I used a Canon EOS 1D MkIV, with a Canon 400mm f/4 DO IS lens, with a Canon 1.4X Series III Teleconverter, f/8 @ 1/1600 sec, ISO 400.