Photos of Seagulls

Today was a good day in photography for me as for the first time in absolutely ages, I took some time out to take photos for the sake of taking the picture. My son was at a birthday party and I had about an hour free, so I went down by the river Severn in Worcester.

Worcester has a cathedral and I was lucky enough to have some lowish sun shining on it:

I don’t often take photos of the cathedral as I find it hard to compose a nice picture of it. Also, it’s been done to death by photographers with a better eye than me. However, I really like this one. The composition is nice and the colour of the brickwork is pleasing.

As I had a mostly empty memory card, I went down to the river to try and take a photo of a bird in flight. This isn’t easy and I took just under 80 shots and had 3 in focus:

I’m pleased with all three as getting a shot of a bird in flight where the bird’s eye isn’t blurred takes lots and lots of practice. As I haven’t practiced, clearly I got lucky! I set my D80 to use the centre auto-focus point, as it’s the most sensitive in the camera, then told it to continually focus and I just pressed the button whilst trying to pan with the moving bird. It’s remarkably difficult to keep the bird in the view finder, let alone keeping the focus point on the eye!

I think I did okay and I’m keen to try again sometime.