Pelican Row

@kairospix: Thank you.

@Viewfinder: An apt analogy, as they were indeed waiting for the chance to get one of the cast off fish remains from the fishermen cleaning their catches. In this case though, unlike a bread line, which is "serial" processed, their positions enabled them to "parallel" process. I couldn't get a good shot of it, but at one point dolphins, sea gulls, and pelicans had all converged to compete for these cast off's.

@shar: Every single one of them in this series was processed with hdr. Most of these shots were taken at around 2 pm, not the best of lighting conditions, and I wanted to see if hdr would be an improvement over the straight image. After hdr I tweaked curves in Photoshop, lightening shadows some, and brightening midtones. Another approach might be to use flash, but I just recently got a good flash unit, and when I took these all I had was the pop-up flash on the camera. I generally prefer natural light, but we can't always choose when we have the opportunity to take pictures.

Of course, flash would be useless on most of these shots, like this one, since the subject is so far away, but it might have improved the shots of the crabs, if I could have positioned it off camera. I think the on camera flash would just have put a hard reflection in the water right in the middle of the frame.