Photographing seagulls
Using this method of photography did work from time to time, however as you can imagine, it wasn’t a very efficient technique. For starters, it takes a lot of room on your camera’s memory card, not to mention having to search through hundreds of shots on your computer afterwards.
After posting a few shots of seagulls in flight on Flickr, it didn’t take me long to realise they were all quite boring and not too different from the hundreds of other photographs of seagulls.
Tips for taking interesting photographs of seagulls
One of best tips a photographer once gave me for photographing birds, was to stop trying to photograph them flying overhead. Look for different angles and compositions from the norm.
For example, be patient and wait for a gust of wind to ruffle their feathers (like in the image above). You can also make good use of a strong morning backlight to help enhance the white feathers.
Like all animal photography, it’s important to try and capture the character or personality of the subject you’re photographing.
For example, if you sit quietly and watch seagulls for a few minutes, it doesn’t take long to notice the bickering, competitive behavior of these birds.
As you can see by the image below, this competitive behaviour is perfect for bird photography. All you need to do is throw a bit of food in to the picture.
Photograph of seagulls taken by pfflyers1 / Craig
The photographer below has captured the elegance of these birds very well by photographing one in the water.
The same photographer (Tammy Jones) at another time, has seen an oportunity to photograph a nautical scene as shown below.
Always take sufficient time to plan and prethink the composition of your shot. Look for opportunities to photograph seagulls in different positions other than those most obvious.
Comments on this entry are closed.