Just for fun, here are some seagull photographs that I took at Parker River Wildlife Refuge in Newburyport, MA earlier this month.
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For me, there are two notable things about these images. On a visceral level, I enjoy looking at them because they remind of the freedom of flight. On a philosophical level, they raise some thorny questions about authorship in photography. Am I the “author” of these images? For many of the photographs that I choose to share, the answer to that question is an unambiguous yes, but these seagull images defy a clear answer because of the particular way I captured them.
Wildlife shots like these are often taken with an extreme telephoto lens that lets the photographer see and track a distant subject as if it were “up close.” But these seagull images are actually extreme crops of wide landscape shots. What that means is that I didn’t really see these gulls in any significant detail at the moment of capture: when I was looking through the camera viewfinder, these gulls were small spots set against a wide expanse of sky. Thanks to the super-high resolution of the camera I was using (50 megapixels) I was able to zoom in after the fact and see these gulls in good detail, for the first time, in my photo processing software.
Of course I had to lug my camera to the beach, watch the gulls for an hour or so, take a few dozen shots, and then spend some time in post-processing before arriving at these particular images. Intuitively, I feel like I earn some kind of “credit” for that. But yet, it still feels awkward to call these photographs “mine” when I didn’t even clearly see the subject at the moment of capture, or have any idea of what I was getting.
This leads into the bigger question of what makes me as a photographer feel connected to any particular image that comes out of my camera? One thing that gives me a feeling of connection is when I set out with a certain intention for a shot and then recognize the intention manifested in the result. Another thing that gives me a feeling of connection is simply that I happen to like the result, regardless of whether I intended the result or not. As for these seagull images, I certainly like them, but it doesn’t feel right to say I intended them.
UPDATE Aug 8, 2018
I couldn’t resit sharing my latest and possibly most dramatic gull photograph so far:
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