"Ghost Gulls", taken with a Canon
5d Mark II camera in February, 2010.
Yes, the seagulls are real.
For the
entire month thousands upon thousands of
seagulls swooped and soared in my cove
as far as the eye could see during the
wee-pre-sunrise morning hours, feeding
on large schools of shad silly enough to
swim near the surface. It was like a
scene from Alfred Hitchcock's, The
Birds, with just a twinge of
Jaws feeding frenzy
tossed in as
an undercurrent. I took hundreds of
low-light pictures throughout the course
of the month, but when I clicked the
shutter on this one, I knew I finally had
the shot. I played around with myriad
color renditions, but none of them
worked for me. At some point, The
Lake Magazine published a
vertically-oriented color version of the
same photograph as a Parting Shot,
but, even so, it took a bit longer for
me to decide that black & white was the
only way to go.
It was not until I began
experimenting with this ghostly,
antique-ish rendering did I become
satisfied with the direction. Sometimes
I revisit a concept over and over again
until it strikes me as being just so.
Especially when the base image is as
haunting as this one. A lot of effort
went into Ghost Gulls.
I hope you like it as much as I do.
