Birds in Nature - images of wild birds by Richard Ditch

Subject: Laughing Gulls (Larus atricilla)
Place: Cape May, NJ, USA
Date: October 1981
Equipment: Nikon FE, Nikkor 300/4.5
Film: Kodachrome 64
Exposure: aperture priority center-weighted meter
Scan: Minolta Dimage, 100% of frame

Commentary: Here's a "state of the art" shot from the golden olden days over 20 years ago.

I was on a boat trip in Cape May, as part of a New Jersey Audubon Society fall weekend. These three Laughing Gulls paced us for a short distance, and I took this with my longest lens at the time, a 300/4.5. This was of course a manual focus lens, and was taken hand held on the only serious film for nature photographers in those days - Kodachrome 64.

I liked this shot enough at the time to enter it in a bird photography contest sponsored by American Birds magazine, and it surprised me by taking third place among "360+" photos. It appeared with the other winners in September 1982, Volume 36, Number 5. The magazine caption reads "A mood picture wins Third Prize this year: gray gulls against a gray sea, which somehow catches one of the infinite images of this ever-changing environment."