This is the first picture I’ve taken with my new entry level DSLR that I actually impressed myself with and it was little more than being in the right place at the right time.

I was driving north through Wisconsin with Marquette, Michigan as the ultimate destination. Passing through Oconto, WI and driving on a bridge over the Oconto River, I saw a mass of white birds floating on the river. I didn’t know what they were but I figured it would be a good chance to test out my camera. I’m upgrading from smartphone to DSLR with the intent of figuring out how to use manual mode and take better pictures overall. I’ve always enjoyed taking photos but now I’d like to have nice detail and depth of field. Something easily obtainable on even an entry level DSLR that just cannot be touched by any smartphone out there.

Anyhow, I whip the car around with a left turn as soon as the bridge ends and I get out and start shooting. I realize at this point the white birds were Pelicans but what I hadn’t seen were about a dozen other black birds which my wife later told me were cormorants.

I was somewhat sad to see that a number of the pelicans had drifted down the river and my zoom only got me so close. Eventually, my stupidity subsides and I see there is another bridge, down river, and it’s no more than a few blocks over.

I get in the car and hustle over and get some shots. I talk to a local person there and he said he’d never seen so many pelicans on the river like that. I hadn’t even seen this many, this close… ever. Not on a river, not on a lake. The best I got was a bunch of them off in the distance from Sturgeon Bay, WI, sitting on a far-ish out grouping of rocks.

I get back to the car and review my pics, send a few to my wife and I see that they are kind of blurry. I had used the camera’s auto setting because I am way too much of a noob to worry about manual settings and missing all of these birds.

I tell myself I’ll get out and take a few more, this time with the camera’s “sport” setting which closes the shutter at a much faster speed in an attempt to freeze motion. As I get out of the car the first thing I see is a pelican diving down to the water so I start to shoot. Eventually I saw (and got photos) of what was happening and that was the pelican being a jerk and trying to steal a fish out of the cormorants beak. As I was taking the photos I was honestly thinking the pelican was just going to straight up eat the cormorant, but they did go their separate ways as I’ll show below.

This had nothing to do with skill, it was purely luck. The day this happened, Lake Michigan had rather strong waves which I think led to the pelicans and cormorants finding a calmer place to fish. They find the Oconto River that day and I was lucky enough to find them.