Seagull in flight

Last week I mentioned how Dun Laoghaire was, for some time, my “go-to” spot for photography when I had the opportunity and the inclination to take my camera out and about for a few hours at the weekend.  Not that it really matters to this particular shot, but this seagull was captured there also, though much more recently than the images I posted last week.

There’s something appealing about photographing seagulls – at least to me – and while on a holiday in Australia a few years back I made a habit of trying to take a seagull photograph every where we went.  It’s not difficult to find a seagull to photograph either as long as you are anywhere near the coast.  Photographing them in flight is a little bit more challenging, but only a little bit.

It helps to have a camera that has some sort of a tracking auto-focus mode, such as my Nikon D300 which can track in 3 dimensions – at least that’s what they claim, and I’ve found it works well.  It also helps if the seagull (or whatever bird you are photographing in flight) is flying against a relatively plain background – such as the overcast sky in this image.

Ideally there will be enough light for you to push the shutter speed to a reasonably high value while being able to still hold some depth of field in the frame with an aperture that is not too wide.  If necessary, considering boosting the ISO to achieve this, but as always with high ISO, watch out for noise.

You want to leave plenty of space around the subject in the frame, so don’t zoom in too tight.  It’s also better composition to leave the subject space to fly in to, so if the bird is going to be coming from the left, put the focus point selector to the left of the frame, so as to encourage you to keep the bird at the left of the shot with plenty of space in the right for him (or her – how do you tell?) to fly in to.  I find keeping the rule of thirds in mind both horizontally and vertically prompts me to place the focus point selector towards the top left segment of the frame, as you can see here.

In terms of setting up your camera, exposure, and focus, you want to have this done long before any seagull enters your frame, and what I find works well is to start tracking a seagull in flight when it is quite small and wait for it to come closer, ensuring that the focus has locked on, before pressing the shutter to take a few frames in quick succession.

If you’re lucky you’ll have more than one sharp frame from which to choose, and you just need to pick the frame in which the seagull has the best “pose”.

I converted this shot to monochrome as there wasn’t a lot of colour in the shot anyway, and I like the muted tones of the conversion that become more apparent when what colour there was present in the scene is taken out of the image.  You’ll notice that the high shutter speed has helped me freeze the action, while the bird is sharp from wing tip to wing tip, thanks to the mid-range aperture.