Digital Photo Gallery of Ted Szukalski
Fine art digital photography, photographic news, reviews, articles and resources.

Sand crabs MG_6018

On our way back from the Little Beach we took a wrong turn. OK, I took a wrong turn. We stopped for a second to re-program the navigation unit. While I was doing that my wife asked: what is that crawling on the sand? We all looked and the whole regions of sand seemed to shift. We all got out of the car to discover thousands of little sand crabs walking together on the beach. I must admit I have never seen this beautiful blue sand crab before, not one, let alone thousands.

I took a lot of photos but these crabs were moving rather fast and as a result only few came out well. This is certainly a spot I will be returning to soon.

There are few things I enjoy more than a day at the beach. I am not talking about public, overcrowded beaches like Bondi or Manly. I’m referring to 100s of natural beaches stretching along the Australian coastline. My family visits one of these on regular basis. There is stuff for kids to explore in and out of the water. A pair of sea eagles lives above in the bush, but I am yet to get a good photograph of them.

The beaches offer lots of photographic opportunities. Endless variety of sandstone rock formations usually draw my attention for their shapes, colours and textures. Today however, I’d like to present a creation done by my kids. For a better word I think I can call it a Sandscape.

Seagull Shadow

When photographing birds in flight the most challenging task is to keep them in focus while tracking them in the flight path. A bit of patience and practice will allow photographers to get reasonable results. Digital photography has introduced something that birders loath – the shutter release delay.

Owners of prosumer grade cameras not only have to track the bird via electronic viewfinder with low refresh rate, they also have to anticipate the lapsed time between the shutter release and the actual photograph. Admittedly recent cameras are quite good in this department and owners of digital SLR cameras don’t really have a problem at all.

The photograph attached to this article was taken with Canon dSLR and Sigma 70-200 lens using AI-Servo focusing mechanism. I must admit the amazing shadow was an added and surprising bonus for what I considered was a practice shot.