Wild Light Photography

Gulls aren’t the most exotic of birds but they make great subjects. Gulls are not shy birds and will allow quite close approaches and they have a lot of interesting behaviour to watch.

Kate and I were staying in campground next to a small inlet which was used by a number of birds including the gulls. They would come and feed or bath in the shallow water mainly in the morning.
Walking to the beach with all my equipment wasn’t so much fun and then the (justifiable) paranoia of sand getting into it made me cautious to begin with. I sat watching the gulls and other birds for a while and had a think. I am not a natural and have to do a lot of thinking!
Gulls and beach is OK but you really need the sea in the photograph. That dictated my approach angle so I didn’t have too much choice in the matter. Then I had to get low down to put the ocean in the photograph as the tide was only just coming in and was some distance off. That’s fine I’m usually lying down crawling through all sorts of terrain.
Having nice still blue water giving wonderful reflections is a dream and so I just had to make use of it. Being so close to the ground means that the reflections are long and I hate to chop off a reflection, it’s either there in its entirety or you don’t use it. That created a couple of problems, fitting the whole reflection in left the gulls quite small in the frame. So I needed more than one. That didn’t take long, there was plenty off gulls coming and going.
So I was pretty much set to go but to add a little drama I wanted waves in the background. Not just crashing waves as the wash might have blown out so I had to catch them as they were breaking. Stop down to F10 with my 500mm lens to get enough depth of field but push the ISO to 200 so that I had a fast enough shutter speed (1/500 in this case). At times like this too much is going on in the frame so ensure your tripod is locked down, autofocus on the subject and then watch for the make or break bits and let the camera do the technical stuff.
I made a number of exposures which were all quite nice but in the one shown (my favourite) it was pure chance that the one gull flew across the top and his position was excellent, the breaking wave was also spot on.