My main goal was to shoot details in the dunes and the sand on this rather dull morning at Ainsdale beach and I managed to create some decent images of both which are posted elsewhere on this blog.
However the gulls doing early morning fly-bys distracted me! Even though my long lens was too short to successfully fill the frame with them I pressed on trying to capture in flight images. After a while I got rather bored with the standard images I was having to push the iso to crazy extremes to freeze the movement and the shots didn’t really inspire me.
So I turned my attention to intentionally blurring the images and had to work for a while to find the right exposure to achieve the right amount of blur. I wanted the images to be recognisable as gulls, but only just. Looong exposures rendered the blur as unusable and I eventually settled on 1/40th of a second to create these images.
I wanted to turn the birds into blurs that emphasised the way they swim through the air and was quite surprised by the results. There was a lot of rubbish of course and the four below are my favourites. The dull light helped by reducing the shadows beneath their wings.
There’s a mix of black-headed and herring gulls here, not that you can tell! A monochrome conversion worked best for me too, reducing the images down to nothing more than form and shade.
Nice motion shots. Flying is what birds do and if you can get the feeling of motion into a photo and still retain some clear recognition of the bird, you’ve got somewhere.
Thank you Harvey. It took me a while to find the right shutter speed to give me the blur but I think I got there eventually.
love these x
Thank you Bridget. x