Bird Photography
One fine day in spring I found myself on an organised walk
to the top of the Rock of Gibraltar. Apart from the famous
apes the other wildlife Gib has in abundance are seagulls.
A year or so earlier I remember being really awed by a photo of
a seagull on the Photopoints website. The difference between this
shot and all the other seagull shots I had seen was that this one
was shot from above, with the sea as the background. I asked the
photographer how he had got the shot, thinking hanglider or some
such contraption, and was rather disappointed with the mundane answer
‘from the top deck of a cruise liner’. Anyway I thought
the Gibraltar trip would be a good opportunity to try my hand at
seagulls, hopefully from above.
I quickly learned two things about photographing birds, they fly
very fast and you can’t really use auto focus. The plain sky
in the background sends the auto focus crazy if the bird is not
in the zone and, even on the ’sport’ setting the camera
cannot keep up. So I changed to manual focus and prepared myself
for the inevitable collection of fuzzy photos. Among the fuzzy ones
though were a few winners. I’m particularily pleased with
this one where the bird seems to be coming straight at me. Usually
I know when I have taken a good shot but in this case I had no idea
until I got home.
I did eventually get a shot of a seagull from above but I prefer
this one.
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