Superstore gull

click photo to enlarge
Pointing my camera at the corner of a Tesco Extra superstore in Kingston upon Hull my eye was drawn to some unexpected movement. It turned out to be a juvenile herring gull perched on the dark metal frame of the glazing, an incongruous shape against the stark regularity of the architecture. What was it doing? Its repeated pecking motions at the glass suggested two possibilities. Perhaps it was trying to break through and help itself to the mounds of food piled high on the shelves within. Or, more likely, it was behaving either aggressively or amorously towards its own reflection. Whatever the reason for its presence on its perch injected a note of idiosyncrasy and contributed a point of interest for a photograph of the man-made background. Something that I've found gulls, and in fact birds in general, sometimes do.

© Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 27mm (40mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Vicarious revenge!

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Just as big fish eat little fish and muscle-bound bullies kick sand in the face of the ten stone weakling, it's always the little guy that seems to come off worse. You're about to drive your tiny Fiat 500 on to a roundabout when a 4X4 the size of a truck, all shiny chrome bull-bars, bristling with external lights and plastered with decals announcing its name - Rampage, Pillager, Half-Wits 'R' Us, or somesuch - barges in front of you, its boorish action the very epitome of the "might is right" doctrine. It's the same at the seaside. You throw the crusts from your sandwiches to the black-headed gulls and they delicately flutter down to hesitatingly snatch a morsel. But before the first one alights in come the herring gulls, slicing heedlessly through the smaller birds like fighter bombers, not landing at all, but sweeping up the food, swallowing it in one gulp, and wheeling round for a second pass. What is a little gull to do? Well, there's no point taking on the big bullies because they'll just flatten you. But if, as is the case at Southport, Lancashire, there's a big bronze statue on the promenade of a proud and haughty herring gull, you can go and crap on its head and get safe, vicarious revenge!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E500
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: N/A