"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.