I have found that I love birds! Here in Chicago we have a ton of seagulls because of Lake Michigan. Since the weather has warmed one of my favorite things to do is go to the lake and take pictures. The water doesn't really do too much, but the birds...the birds are always doing something!
On one particular day, I had just received an order for a few new filters for one of my lenses and was eager to try them out. I packed my things and walked down to the beach. The filter I was so eager to try out is a circular polarizer, it can darken the sky, and eliminate glare without affecting the rest of the image. So far I've gotten some good results!
See the black corners on that last one? That's from my lens hood, my photographer dad and I are trying to figure out why that's a thing!
So as I'm trying to focus on the sky, (which was beautiful that day!) I began to notice the birds flying around, and how elegant they looked.
Seagulls can fly rather slowly compared to smaller, more common birds like Robins, which makes them a lot easier to photograph in flight. But these shots were just not cutting for me, I wanted to get up close! I found a spot where they were gathering on the beach and set myself up a few feet away, camera ready for when they would undoubtedly all scatter for no apparent reason. Problem was...they all seemed perfectly content to just sit there...and sit there.
Until... I noticed a man stop at a bench behind me with a big bag of something that looked like bread crumbs and started tossing! It was almost a Hitchcock's The Birds feel, you know, except better! (I wasn't getting dive bombed or anything!) I was suddenly surrounded by gulls in flight, swooping this way and that, going absolutely nuts! I couldn't hit that shutter fast enough!
Crazy right!!! Once the man was out of crumbs and the pandemonium died down, I turned to go talk to him, and say thank you, clearly he wasn't doing this just for me, but for that few minutes I was in art/photography/seagull heaven! I wanted to make sure he knew how he made my day! But sadly, when I turned to walk his direction, he was gone, and since this outing clearly could not get any better, I started home. Before I left the park however, I spotted some different kinds of birds, and spent a couple minutes hanging out with this guy!
He also had a lady friend but she was not too interested in me or my camera!
Check back in a couple days, I am working on a series of three 5 x 7in paintings of these gulls in flight, I hope to have some pictures up in a few days!
