Last summer, I talked about a trip I took to the Outer Banks, and how I hadn’t been there in a while. It appears it was even longer than I thought, because this slide is from the last time I was there, I believe, and dates from 2007! That’s just not right. I’m going to ensure that I don’t wait anywhere near that long between trips, ever again…
Anyway, this ring-billed gull (Larus delawarensis) was posed on the first high point of the beach looking around with a pompous air, and I got low and fired off a few frames against the water and sky; when it finally turned towards me, I was lucky enough to have a curler break in the background. You might think, at the coast, this is a trivial thing to capture, but the truth is, waves don’t always break in a dynamic way, and they do so in sporadic locations along the beach, so having one in the frame for the couple of seconds that the gull turned towards me was more chance than guaranteed. The image accompanying this post was taken during the same shooting session, and I waited a few minutes for the waves to produce a nice inverted mimicry of the cloudbank above. Not to mention that the beach wasn’t as deserted as it appears at all, and the tight vertical composition there cropped out the nearby bathers. I often end up doing this on beaches… but not, as I said, as often as I should.