How to photograph – Black-headed Gulls

 

So all you need to get the images of Black-headed Gulls you want is a loaf of bread and a camera, right?  Well almost, but not quite.  Black-headed Gulls can be trickier than you would think to photograph successfully.

A bit about Black-headed Gulls

Black-headed Gulls must be one of the easiest birds to find.  They are common at both the seaside and inland; in fact they are the gulls you are most likely to see away from the sea!  They can be found in almost every environment, including supermarket car parks, duck ponds and rubbish tips.  They are true scavengers and make a living tidying up after us messy humans.

Their name is a bit of a red herring because their heads are in fact brown and are indeed white for the majority of the year!  Perhaps they should have been called the “Usually White but sometimes Brown-headed Gull!”

They are found across most of Europe and Asia and are easily distinguished from other gulls, if you are unsure look for the white edge to the wing in flight and the black “tail” when on the ground. 

What most people don’t realise it that they are a migratory species.  During the winter they move south and the British population swells with Gulls moving down from Iceland.  Populations from Britain, particularly Southern England, will also move South across the Channel into mainland Europe – this is much more evident during a harsh winter.

As a species to photograph they are often overlooked, Black-headed Gulls tend to be the distraction rather than the attraction at good photographic locations.  But they can be wonderful sources of images and they are also a great species to practice your skills on – they are practically everywhere, bold and so approachable.

What you need to get the image you want

You shouldn’t have any problems finding this species – in fact we have all probably had experience of trying to feed the ducks and instead ended up feeding hordes of Black-headed Gulls.  You’ll probably even be able to create images in a variety of different settings, from your garden to the local park and the seaside.

The fact that this species is incredibly used to people also means that you shouldn’t have any problem photographing them in a variety of poses and also in-flight. 

One piece of ‘kit’ that will come in very handy is a bag of bread!  Turn up at any part of the British seaside with a few crusts of bread and you will quickly attract a flock of Black-headed Gulls.  If you’re trying for flight shots a good tip is to take someone with you to throw the bread for you – it is very tricky trying to throw bread and focus a camera at the same time.  Also be warned – my wife was on bread throwing duties when 3 or 4 gulls did their ‘duty’ on her; dry cleaning bills are quite steep!

The technical bit:

Black-headed Gulls are harder to photograph than you would think.  Finding them is not a challenge at all and you can usually get so close that a long lens is a disadvantage, but the bright white of their feathers does pose a problem.  If you are photographing the Gulls on a sunny day the real danger is that you end up with either a very bright white bird with all the feather detail burnt out or a grey looking bird against a bright background.  This is because the camera exposure system is based on averages.  There are a couple of ways around this. 

Firstly, try and photograph the Gulls in the soft, and more forgiving, light of dawn and dusk.  Frankly this is true for most wildlife photography as the light is much more pleasing. 

Secondly, and this is the technical bit, you need to manage the exposure to compensate for the brightness of the bird’s feathers.

So how to do this?  Most cameras will allow you to adjust the exposure settings and although it sounds complicated it is in fact fairly straightforward.  Point your camera at the whitest part of the bird (using spot metering if you have it) and see what setting it thinks you should be using; it is wrong.  Your camera is programmed to try and achieve an “average” exposure right across the image, so will see the bright white and massively under-expose the image.  The camera is acting like you do when you screw your eyes up against a sudden bright light.  To counteract this you need to manage the exposure for the image you want to take. The easiest way to do this is to select a faster shutter speed or change the size of the aperture.

Shutter speed speaks for itself – think of holding your hand over your eyes, removing them and then covering them again.  The faster you do it the less you see.

When talking of aperture think of the human eye and the iris.  The aperture opens and closes like the iris in your eyes and you can control the size of the “hole” in the aperture.  The bigger the hole the more light that will get in and vice versa.  Confusingly the aperture size is recorded like this f/5.6 or f/11, etc and as it is a fraction the larger the number the smaller the “hole” so f/22 is a much smaller hole than f/4!

So if you look at your lcd screen on your camera and the Black-headed Gull you just photographed looks like a Daz commercial, try again with a slightly faster shutter speed or a smaller aperture and see how it goes.  If your bird looks grey you need to try for a slower shutter speed, although not too slow if the bird is moving as you will get a blurred image, or a larger aperture.  Remember though that as the light changes you will have to change your settings.

I generally work to a rule of thumb that I should always expose an image for the brightest part of the frame.  It usually works!

Conclusion

Black-headed Gulls are everywhere – go out and make the most of them.  They are often overlooked and yet are attractive subjects to work on, plus they are great for practising your skills on. 

Black-headed Gulls are perfect for getting your in-flight skills honed, get down to your local seaside or park and work on them as they fly over.

As always, if you have any questions do drop me an email.