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It all started when we visited the fossilized forest at Curio Bay on New Zealand’s southeastern coast. In the photo above, you can see one of the ancient, petrified trees that are visible in the rock at low tide. We were told that the endangered Yellow-Eyed Penguins are frequently spotted in the area but that they are usually only making their way between the ocean and their nesting areas at sunrise and sunset. As we were there near mid-day, it was doubtful we would see any. If we did, however, signs instructed visitors to keep at least two car-lengths away to make sure the penguins could go about their business undisturbed.

Wanting to get clear of the bulk of the tourists at the site, I picked up my pace and headed for the far end of the rocky beach where I found some great examples of the petrified logs and stumps and began photographing them. A few moments later, a sound caught my attention and I looked up to see two Yellow-Eyed Penguins emerging from the underbrush at the top of the beach.

One was more bashful and stayed in the shade but, as I continued to photograph them, the other made his way cautiously onto the beach. I picked a location where it looked like he would cross my path, but where he wouldn’t come so close that I would disturb him. Once again — as had happened on several occasions on this trip — I was happy to have brought along my Tamron 18-270mm zoom lens. I hadn’t been expecting to be photographing wildlife at this location and had nearly come to the beach with only a 17-35. Luckily I’d decided otherwise and now the 270mm end of the Tamron was just what I needed.

I wasn’t too aware of what was going on behind me until the penguin had gone and I turned around to leave. It was then that I noticed that a large group of people had assembled behind me and had been photographing the penguins as well. One was a fellow photographer from my group who had, unfortunately, come to the beach with only a 60mm prime lens. He’d made do and gotten some nice shots but he certainly didn’t have as many options available to him as I had.

Here are a couple of shots — first, just as the penguin re-emerged after walking behind a large rock:

That shot’s cropped a bit, but it’s sharp enough to handle it. I mainly cropped it to get rid of some distracting gull poo in the foreground. Proof that you can’t control everything in the scene. The next shot is closer to full frame but is also cropped a small amount just to get rid of some visual noise around the edge of the frame and also to show the penguin a bit better at the small size required by this blog template:

I don’t generally like to crop photos after they are shot. Coming from a background of shooting transparency, I learned to crop in-camera. It was a necessity. I’m only recently embracing the ability to crop and re-frame images in Lightroom or Photoshop. Files captured by modern DSLRs are now large enough that there is some lee-way. You can crop an image down a bit and still have a reasonably large file that will be viable as a stock image. I continue prefer to “get it right” in-camera whenever possible, but it has become a welcome byproduct of digital photography that I can now tweak an image’s crop later to make it stronger. Especially in situations like this where time was limited and I wasn’t able to reposition myself or to get closer just to eliminate some distracting element in the foreground or background.