This woodburning is based on a photo I took in Aruba—by which I mean I looked straight up into blinding tropical sun, swung the camera over my head, and clicked about 50 times, hoping for the best. One of them worked.

The pelican didn’t pose. The light was unforgiving. And I’m fairly confident Ansel Adams wouldn’t have approved of the technique. But the moment was there, and that’s what I tried to capture here—heat, glare, wings overhead, and the split second when everything lines up anyway.