Photographing California Brown Pelicans in La Jolla

Here are my thoughts and recommendations for photographing California brown pelicans in La Jolla. If you like these photos, you can also see lots more blog posts from past sessions photographing California brown pelicans in La Jolla. Or, I’ve got a gallery of some keepers on my website, but many of the good ones from the last couple years I have not gotten around to captioning and putting on the web yet: California Brown Pelican photo gallery. Cheers, and thanks for looking!

• Update November 2023: Recommendations for flight photography and head throw settings at the bottom of this page.

A morning visit to the cliffs of La Jolla to photograph seabirds is on the list of many California photographers. Note I did not say “bird photographers”. This location is appealing because good seabird photographs are easily achieved here, to the extent that shooters like myself with modest bird photography skills can have really productive sessions and in a single visit can generate a variety of strong images to add to their collections. Among seabirds I find the California race of the brown pelican particularly attractive and fun to watch, so when I am in La Jolla shooting it is the pelican that gets most of my attention.  (I also love albatrosses, boobies and terns.)

The best time to visit the La Jolla cliffs is during the winter months, sunrise through mid-morning. The California brown pelican displays its most colorful winter plumage from late December through February, punctuated by a dramatic red throat pouch.  (My understanding is that breeding adults will also have a dark brown hind-neck, while non-breeding adults will have white neck.)  Typically, winter mornings in San Diego offer clear skies and good sunlight conditions for photography, and if you are fortunate the wind will also be in your favor (i.e., offshore) when you are there. If you can manage to time your visit during the week you will probably share the small cliff top area with fewer people than if you visit on the weekend. As you will see, the fewer photographers occupying the limited space on the cliffs, the better. Upon arriving you may not find many pelicans on the cliffs, or none at all, or a whole crowd of them. Regardless, move slowly so that the birds that are there can become used to your presence and are not shocked into taking flight. Pelicans that are on the cliffs are there to rest, and if they are flushed they will likely settle down on another cliff and not return for quite a while, if at all.

The waxing light before sunrise can offer pleasing pastel-colored backgrounds again which to frame up gulls and pelicans. I often see photographers combining pastel-colored ambient light with a bit of strobe fill. This is a delicate balance of light and is made difficult by the need for high ISO (e.g., 400) to freeze the wings with shutter speed. However, the high ISO means you must not underexpose to avoid excessive shadow noise. Don’t be afraid to meter so that the clear dawn sky, with the sun at your back, is at +2 or more stops, decreasing gradually as the sun rises. A Better Beamer can be helpful to increase the throw (distance) of your flash, and a bracket serves to position the flash off the axis of the lens to avoid red eye.

Direct sun will light the reach cliffs and birds about 30 minutes after sunrise proper, being blocked for a while by La Jolla’s Mount Soledad behind you. You will find that you can frame up the resting and preening pelicans that are standing on the cliff edges with attractive frontlighting — the type of lighting I prefer — by ensuring that your shadow is pointed directly at the birds. As in portrait photography, front lighting with a long lens serves to flatten and simplify the subject in a flattering way. Pelicans are contrasty, with coloration ranging from pure white and hot yellow and red to deep gray and black; side lighting is just too harsh for my taste.

Framing individual birds against a distant, out of focus, pleasing blue or green ocean backdrop is dead easy. The key to creating a defocused background is to place a relatively uncomplicated background at a great distance relative to the subject. In La Jolla the pelicans are 15-50′ (5-15m) from you while the background cliffs, waves or blue ocean range from a hundred yards to a mile away or more. With distance ratios like that it is possible to stop down to f/8 or f/11 to hold depth of field on the subject with a 500mm lens and still achieve a defocused background, making the subject’s edges appear especially sharp. Take advantage of soft background and leave negative space in some of your vertical compositions to allow for that cover shot that will allow you to retire early. Before the sun climbs too high it is possible to put a catchlight from the sun in your pelican’s eye, or to maximize the visibility of water droplets on a pelican that has just returned from the water. To do this, position your subject so that the sun is directly behind you and low. If the shadow of your lens lies just to the side of your subject, you are in the right spot.

Focus on the eye! I try to put critical focus on my subject’s eye in all of my wildlife photographs, and pelicans are no exception. The eye of an animal, especially in a portrait composition, is an anchor for the viewer. Invariably and naturally, when first viewing a photograph a viewer’s glance is immediately drawn to the subject’s eye. For this reason the eye must be tack sharp and well-placed. Once that is achieved, use what depth of field is available (given the available light and choice of shutter speed and ISO) to try for sharp chest, head and neck details, knowing that depth of field with super-telephotos is notoriously small and that some near or far detail may be a bit soft.

For best flight shots I hope for a clear horizon and offshore morning breezes, so that the pelicans approach the cliffs upwind and are frontlit as they fly directly toward the lens. In this way their faces and undersides are illuminated as they spread those huge wings to soar and land. It is tempting to shoot frames as they fly past, and I have certainly shot my share of those. But back at the editing table I find that in nearly every case side lighting produces an image that is too harsh and gets tossed. If you do not have offshores don’t despair; often upon approach to the cliffs the pelicans will wheel and make a second pass before deciding where to set down, especially if the cliff is already crowded with pelicans or people. Take advantage of these loops to obtain the angle you need.

When shooting pelicans in flight in La Jolla the background will quickly change from bright sky to deep blue ocean water, whitewash and waves to brown sandstone cliffs. These situations will fool your light meter and, if you are shooting in one of the automatic modes, will often produce blown head and wing highlights or an underexposed bird. Metering on a neutral area such as a grey guana-covered rock, works well for me. In a pinch I will set my exposure so that the palm of my (caucasian) hand is at +1.

Head throws, where your pelican stretches its throat and lifts it bill straight up in the air, are the most distinctive and amusing behaviors among these birds. It seems that most of the photographers I’ve talked with at the cliffs are keen to get a good shot of a pelican’s head throw. It’s not too hard, you’ll get it if you are willing to put in some time and stand ready. Any pelican that is standing and has its eyes open is a good candidate to throw its head back. I’ve seen a single individual do it five or six times in the course of just a few minutes. Head throws are as contagious as sneezes among a group of pelicans. If you see one do it be ready for his neighbor to do it too. Take a few test frames and check your histograms for blinkies ahead of time, so that it is simply a matter of framing it up when you see the pelican’s head drop down and back first, before being swung straight up in the air. Heck, with today’s ultra-fast motor drives and focusing systems, the camera practically takes the photo for you. Think about the right focal length for where you are standing. You’ll need to be wide enough to contain about twice the height of a standing pelican to include the entire bird when it is tossing its bill up.

Go mid-week if you can, and avoid groups if you can. The fewer people on the point the better. The cliffs are increasingly crowded with photographers (and visitors) each winter. When I would visit the cliffs after swimming the cove in the 80’s, I never saw another photographer there. In the 90’s there would be a few and now it seems photographers, alone or in groups, are there most weekend mornings December through February. This is probably a good thing, as these birds are deserving of our appreciation, and for the most part the behavior of photographers alongside whom I have shot at the cliffs has been respectful of these special birds.

A handy map link showing the “main spot” (there are lots of other good spots nearby which you will discover with a little walking): Google map showing cliffs, Prospect Blvd. and Coast Blvd.

Portraits.  I like to have my shadow pointed directly at the pelican, and have the sun as low in the sky behind me as possible, for portraits.  On cloudy days the sun angle constraint is not important and you can move around more freely.  When trying for a side-on portrait, be sure the head is tilted towards you just a few degrees, and the eye is looking directly at you if possible.  The former makes a big difference in how a viewer perceives or connects with the portrait, and the latter will ensure the catch-light in the pelican’s eye is as centered as possible.

Recommendations for Camera Settings

The world doesn’t need another image of a brown pelican in flight, but I enjoy trying to make different renditions of my favorite seabirds flying and it keeps me in practice during the winter between dive trips.

I no longer use a tripod here, just a light monopod that I can pick up with the camera when I need to move quickly on a flyer or a head-thrower. A thought on the 600 f/4: it’s a fine lens but usually not needed on Goldfish Point unless you are looking to make tight portraits. 600mm is often too much lens for the last moments when the bird spreads its wings as it slows to land, which for me is the only moment of flight I care about.  And it is definitely too much lens for head throws here.

Sony Alpha One and 200-600 lens (my current setup). This is a fantastic camera and lens. 30 fps, excellent high ISO (when needed), and the autofocus seems to be the best I have ever used. I rarely miss focus on the eye of the bird now. I am getting so many keepers of flight images now it is silly.  I simply use stock settings without any special tuning: continuous autofocus, electronic shutter, 30 frames per second, compressed raw files, zone autofocus with eye recognition set to “bird”.  The morning I wrote this I had been shooting the birds; in full sun shortly after sunrise I was exposing ISO 640, f/6.3, 1/3200.  Another good lens is the 70-200 f/2.8 with 1.4TC, effectively 100-300 f/4 (roughly).  This shorter lens is great when the lower cliff is so chock full of birds that incoming birds are forced to land on the top of the bluff, right in your face.

Canon R5 and 200-400 lens (my Winter 2022 setup). In December 2022 we had a confluence of conditions that offered ideal flight photography and I took advantage of it several mornings in a row. We had clear skies to the east, wind from the east, high tides in the morning, high surf and, on top of that, a large aggregation of bait just offshore. In those tidal and surf conditions the birds choose to land higher up on the rocks since the lower areas are awash with waves, and with wind from the east the birds approach at the perfect sun angle. With the bait present, the birds would go out and forage (dive-bombing balls of sardines and mackerel alongside, terns, gulls and sea lions) and then return to rest, dry and preen before cycling back out to forage. In this way pelicans were constantly coming and going. Over several days I experimented with different focusing modes and sensitivities on my Canon R5, eventually settling on a combination that produces tack-sharp-on-the-eye most of the time. Sometimes the first handful of frames will be soft on the eye as the camera acquires focus, but once it is locked it remains sharp throughout most of the sequence, rarely loosing focus.  This means one should engage the AF early, at least a few moments before releasing the shutter – but that has always been a best practice. All I have to do is stand in the right spot (there are three good spots, depending on wind angle and how many birds are on the cliffs) and pull the trigger. The light reaches the birds at 7:30 and by 8:30 the light is too high for me and I am picking up a cappuccino at Girard Gourmet on my way home with a bunch of images to review later in the day.

Below are the settings I currently use when shooting large slow birds in flight. I hand-hold a Canon 200-400, usually around 250-300mm for the flight shots depicted here. I no longer use a tripod for flight images as it simply gets in the way except for those few situations where the bird is steadily tracking a straight line and you can pan with it perfectly. Some can do that well but not me. I find handholding is better.

• The first ten minutes when the light reaches over the top of Mount Soledad is the best, but it changes fast and you can easily blow out highlights if you don’t check them.
• Once the sun is fully on the birds, my typical exposure with clear skies and sun at my back is ISO 500, f/5.6, 1/2500. It doesn’t change much over the first hour or so of the morning once the sun has risen above Mt. Soledad.
• Electronic shutter and continuous high frame advance so I have 20 frames per second and can choose the wing position that looks best. I don’t see any rolling shutter artifacts with slow-moving pelicans.
• cRAW rather than RAW, since cRAW cuts the file size in about half and roughly doubles the buffer to 99 frames. Combined with very fast memory cards in both slots, I never hit the buffer limit.  I don’t see any degradation in image quality by using cRAW compared to RAW.
• AF operation: SERVO AF
• AF method: I use both Expand AF area (the “plus sign” to the right of 1-point AF) and Eye-tracking set to animals (not people).
• Shutter release: set to use Expand AF area as the focus mode, and this is what I use for flight. Yes, I believe it works a little better than Eye-tracking for flight situations. One does need to keep the focus points on the face of the bird.
• Back button AF-ON: set to use Eye-tracking as the focus mode. I used this for portrait situations. When initializing AF using the back button AF-ON, the R5 will continue to use Eye-tracking even when I depress the release shutter button in spite of the fact the shutter release by itself it set to use Expand AF area. So it is a perfect situation, I can use either AF mode instantly depending on whether its a flight image or portrait or head-throw.
• Servo AF: I use “Case 2: continue to track subjects, ignoring possible obstacles”. Furthermore, I set the Tracking Sensitivity to maximum minus (all the way left) and Accel/decel tracking to max plus (all the way right).  My intuition tells me this setting is the most important in getting the focus perfect on the eye.
• CFExpress (slot 1) card: SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO CFexpress Card Type B ($120).  When used with the R5, this card is so fast I never hit the buffer.  The 99 image buffer can clear completely in only 2-3 seconds. Its unbelievable compared to anything I have used in the past. Once back home, I can unload 4000+ images from this card to Lightroom on my Mac Studio in just a few minutes.
• CF (slot 2) card: SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I ($22). This is the backup card and only gets used when the photography is fantastic and I am shooting nonstop.  When traveling I bring 10-15 of these (they are cheap) and I don’t re-format them during the trip. So I have at least two backups of every image as soon as I have downloaded the images to Lightroom.
• Save files to slot 1 first, switching to slot 2 only when slot 1 is full.  This gives me 8000+ RAW files before I need to change cards.  I never get buffered out on the CFExpress card, and only in extreme situations do I hit the buffer on the regular CF card.
• A final note on composition.  I often include the horizon in my images, including at times when it bisects the bird, and this is especially true of flight images.  I will also often include a “piece” of another bird along the periphery of an image since that hints at how many other birds are just out of the frame.  Given enough time on site, creating images with clean backgrounds is not difficult.  So the challenge is to break compositional rules in an effort to make an image that tells a slightly different story yet still has an appealing aesthetic.  You’ll see plenty of images of mine where the horizon or a distant reef or wave appears in the image, or where parts of birds around the periphery of the image are seen; those aren’t accidents.

Head throws.  What does it mean?  Maybe head throws are like yawns and highly contagious among the pelicans, or maybe something more is going on — I’ll leave that to the biologists.   Nevertheless, it is an interesting and challenging behavior to capture.   I try to use eye-detection autofocus but sometimes things happen so quickly another focus mode is in use.  Here are some comments specifically about photographing pelican head throws.  I usually get a few good ones each morning, although sometimes when there are few or no other people around there will be so many pelicans I cannot get a clean shot isolating just one bird – that’s a nice problem to have!

A word about the welfare of the birds.  Yes, they are nearly tame and have been for decades.  But they are on the cliffs to rest, having spent considerable energy offshore foraging for food and then diving to acquire it.  Don’t push them.  By giving the pelicans space, moving properly and being alone, I have been able to watch groups of several hundred, so many that one literally cannot walk to the edge of the top of the bluff to look down — there are too many birds.  That’s an ideal day for flight images (provided the wind cooperates) and head throws.  Avoid coming in groups. Avoid chatter. Avoid lumbering around with too much gear and photo backpacks, you are not on safari and you are probably only 50 yards from your car.

Here are few images (some by iPhone) to give you an idea of how many pelicans are on the cliff on a good day.  Take a look at the first two images — you almost certainly won’t see that if there is a group of people on the bluff, the birds simply won’t approach Goldfish Point in those numbers when there are people walking about where they want to land and rest. Groups, in their eagerness to get close to the pelicans, may end up driving the birds off Goldfish Point and onto other nearby cliffs or around the point to south of the Children’s Pool, in ones and twos so that over the course of a half hour dozens or more have left.  If someone has moved down to the lower part of the bluff you absolutely, positively won’t see numbers like this at Goldfish Point.

By being silent, moving slowly or not at all and giving the birds space especially as they are arriving on the bluff from the ocean, one can ensure that they will land close and hang out just yards away. Once they begin preening you can move around a little but leave the bags and tripods and all that junk in your car and don’t come in a group if you can avoid it.

Pelicans fly away.