Dancing in the air. Seagulls put up a great show while searching for food at the Beach. The Pixel 6 Pro smartphone did a fine job in capturing this action shot.
May, 2022Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
I took this photo while walking along Indian Rocks Beach in west Florida (relatively close to Tampa Bay area) in the late afternoon. The seagulls were pretty active, flying all around this stretch of the beach, as they were trying to catch some leftover food they could spot laying on the sand.Time
We went for a late afternoon walk along the beach on a Saturday in early May, 2022. I was able to capture this birds in flight photo around 6:00 pm that day. It was a very clear afternoon with no clouds in the skyLighting
During the month of May, the days start to get longer in the northern hemisphere, so there was plenty of light when I took this photo. The sun was still up in the sky as the coastline in this stretch of Florida faces west. The light was just perfect for birds in flight type of photography .Equipment
I snapped this photo with my Pixel 6 Pro smartphone. I've been experimenting with different types of photography (and videography) with my smartphone, to test the different features this smartphone offers.Inspiration
I love action photography, specially when it comes to capturing birds in flight, which are fairly hard to photograph in general. It is also specially hard to photograph birds in flight with a smartphone since there is no burst mode in my mobile device, and there is no viewfinder either. For that reason, it was almost a "lucky strike" to have captured this sharp composition with the seagulls being close to us while flying around.Editing
I did some basic post-processing on this image using Google Photos editor. The main adjustments I made to this image were to crop it to square format, and to remove some elements from the bottom of the photo using the "magic eraser" feature. Other than that, the image was pretty sharp and with proper lighting, thanks to the computational photography (AI) available in the Pixel 6 Pro phones.In my camera bag
My photography equipment is fairly minimalist: I own a Nikon D7500 DSLR camera. The lenses I carry with this camera are the Tamron 18-400mm super zoom lens, a Nikon AF-P DX NIKKOR 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6G VR lens, and a AF-S DX NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G prime lens. I also own an Olympus Tough TG-6 compact camera (used mostly for macro and underwater photography) and a DJI Osmo Action camera (also used for underwater photography).Feedback
If you own a flagship smartphone like an iPhone 13 Pro, a Pixel 6 Pro, or a Samsung S22 Ultra, you should certainly leverage their technology for photography purposes. Smartphones are handy for taking photos. Great shots require great timing, and for that a smartphone has two big advantages: You carry it everywhere, and you intuitively get how it works. And while smartphones are still limited by the size of their sensors and lenses, the technology keeps improving quite rapidly. The camera app on most smartphones can autofocus and even track a subject. But for more precision and power you’ll want to have manual control. The ProCamera app (for iPhones) and the Camera FV-5 app (for Android) let you adjust the following key functions: Timed Shutter, ISO, file size, and shutter speed. In terms of composing your shot, your smartphone will let you home in on a bird, but it isn’t a true zoom—it just crops into the size of the original photo and leaves you with a pixelated image. Also avoid shooting square images—there’s no point in cropping out detail prematurely.
