Espumilla Beach, an important nesting site for sea turtles, is also one those magical places where Galapaogos sea birds regularly feed. One of my pre-trip goals was to photograph a diving Blue Footed Booby about to strike the water, and this beach proved to be the best place in the Galapagos to do it. These birds soar high into the air, spot a fish, and plunge straight down to the ocean, entering the water like a knife. It is very difficult photograph to get -- to frame, expose, and focus on a plunging bird takes great skill and a good deal of luck. I also wanted a well-composed image, one without a lot of blank sky or empty water as context. I spent a half hour here, shooting several hundred pictures of diving boobies in order to make this particular image. (Thankfully, I was granted the luxury of time here -- our tour group was hiking on the island, and our guide made it possible for me to stay behind on the beach, accompanied by one of our boatmen, in order to concentrate solely on photographing diving boobies.)

I used my smaller camera, zoomed to its maximum focal length of 90mm, to get this shot. It allowed me to place our tour group's ship, the Barkentine "Mary Anne," in the background, as well as add a layer of clouds between the ship and the ocean. The birds were plunging through my frame regularly, and I used a fast shutter speed of 1/800th of a second to freeze this one just as it began to furl its wings and retract its feet so it could enter the water with the least resistance. Its body was already stretched out to its limit. I was able to place the bird in the upper left hand corner of the frame to counterbalance the sailing ship in the lower right hand corner, creating a diagonal composition. It took both time and a lot of "misses" to make this photograph, but the result was well worth the effort.