Dalmatian Pelicans with Jayne Bond

Dalmatian Pelicans with the Canon RF 100-300mm f2.8L IS USM

One of our customers, Jayne Bond recently took a special trip out to Greece to photograph some spectacular birds. Check out her incredible photos, videos and write up below.

I recently invested in the Canon RF 100-300 f2.8 lens. It was bought to replace my all-time favourite lens, the EF 500 f4, which, at my tender age, was simply becoming too heavy for me to carry around. A friend asked if I would miss the focal length but with the 1.4x extender, I still get 420mm at f4 and, without the adapter 100-300mm at f2.8 so the overall flexibility of this lens is simply perfect.

I was excited to take the lens with me on my annual trip to Lake Kerkini in Greece to photograph the Dalmatian Pelicans and it didn’t disappoint. I’ve never had any issues carrying photography equipment on board a flight, but this lens is compact enough to fit into my ThinkTank BackLight 26L bag and the lighter weight just made travelling so much easier.

When photographing the pelicans, we spend several hours each day on a boat. The weather in the first few days was quite dull, the light was flat, the water was choppy, and folk were continuously moving around, so my footing was very unstable, but I could hand hold the camera and focus on the moving birds in an instant. Shooting at f2.8 was a dream, allowing me to use a lower ISO when the light was dull, and achieving that gorgeous, dreamy, shallow depth of field which I absolutely love.

Panning has never been my forte so I was keen to see how much I could slow the shutter speed down… 1/60 was the slowest I tried, and I have to say my success rate was definitely higher than previous years, especially as this is done standing a rocking boat without much body stabilisation!!! The other thing I was very keen to try was video. I’ve seen some amazing slow-motion videos on social media so was keen to spend time working on developing a few different skills! Again, handheld on a rocking boat isn’t the easiest but it does provide a great test for the capabilities of the lens, and I’m so pleased with the result. Having taken a series of short videos I then moved them across to my phone and put them together using the InShot app.