Photographed at the Persian Gulf. These birds follow ships and pick fish brought up by the ship's wake hence their movement is relatively steady with respect to the ship. When the bird is in the right position with respect to the sun, it provides a wonderful opportunity to photograph them. The first two photographs were clicked when my ship was at anchor and I was practicing panning the camera. The tight fit framing of the third picture was purely accidental, since its hard to get the framing right when you photograph flying birds. I must have clicked about 50 -60 photographs of this bird, to get the right framing. Patience and persistence pays.
All the while I kept the camera mode on aperture priority and let the camera decide the shutter speed. Metering on center weighed average, assuming that the bird will be at the center of the frame, and shooting at continuous frames.
A Lesser black backed Gull, flies across a anchor cable of my ship. I was photographing the Gull standing below the anchor cable, when I saw the beautiful contrast between the Red shackle and the blue sky. Set my tripod to incorporate the cable, set to manual focus and focused on the cable and waited for a bird to flyby. Once the gull obliged, I went on clicking till he went out of frame.
