seagull delight

Today we have wind, stormy clouds, rain and even some hail. While out and about running errands we headed for the harbor for some inspiration for my class assignment. Yup, I'm taking another photography class. This weekly focus is action shots. When we drove into this mostly vacant harborside parking lot we noticed this lone vehicle with a man tossing bread to a sea of seagulls! They were swarming all over the place in flight and darting to and fro for a shot at snatching up the beloved bread. I instructed hubby to stop our vehicle and I held out my camera and started shooting. What fun! The seagulls saw us and thought we had food too and soon enough started trickling over to our vehicle. Sadly, we had very few food scraps (darnit, usually the kids leave something on the floor!). Well, after about 5 - 10 minutes the gentleman in the vehicle had had enough and drove over to us and he said he had some bread remaining if we wanted some. And we gladly accepted his offering. Two full loafs of bread and a kind thank you with a smile later and we were feeding the birds! Well, we (my hubby and son) and I was behind the camera firing away hoping to capture their acrobatic feeding frenzy! It was high action and they were darting here and there and soon were on the vehicle. It was exciting! My adrenaline was pumping and I was all jazzed up. It was 20-30minutes of excitment and about a 100 shots or so later. These are my top four picks. What a generous and kind man to share his daily ritual with offerings with us. We really appreciated it and if there was some way to get him a photo I would gladly offer him a print of him in action. Maybe someday. For now, Thank you, to a generous fellow.


I took many shots to get this one just right. They were catching the bread in the air! Now that's some serious coordination. Amazing flyers.

Stormy weather yields some awesome dramatic lighting and sky. Here the bird is illuminated against a dark sky and stands out in a somewhat 3D effect. LOVE that! Getting those birds into the light was a huge challenge that as you can see paid off with persistance and best of all patience.

I should have framed this shot in black so that you can see the sea of milky white clouds here. Hmm... maybe Ill change my template for showing. I just love this. It is not desirable to have the same color against the same color background but I'm totally weird, and love it! I just love the milky subtle graces. It feels coastal to me. =)

Thanks for stopping by!