SteemitPhotoChallenge #10 - Minimalism - Entry 3 - 'The Freedom of Flight'

jaytaylor (62)in #steemitphotochallenge • 8 years ago (edited)

Photo - 'The Freedom of Flight' by Jay Taylor, my Entry #3 into the SteemitPhotoChallenge #10 - Minimalism

The freedom of flight - as free as a bird... For me, birds are the ultimate symbol of freedom, and as near as it is possible to come to perfection embodied. Love them or hate them (with so much ugliness in the world, how it's possible to hate any bird is a mystery to me!), gulls are a prime example of this - they can walk on land, float on the water, and soar overhead, aerial acrobats, through the sky. They take nothing more than they need, come and go entirely at will, and leave nothing behind which Nature cannot readily reuse...

I know that @jamtaylor strongly advised entrants to take photos specifically for this challenge, but I literally cannot leave this image out of a competition with the theme of minimalism - I've tried, but I can't do it... It is literally screaming at me for inclusion! I hope that Jam and the voters will forgive me, but to me this is the quintessential minimalist photograph in my portfolio, and one that has had precious little exposure previously in any case... I love this image more every time I look at it - for me, everything about it is perfect, even in its imperfections, which give it a truly magical, etherial feel for me. The last thing I would have wanted for this shot would be razor sharp focus or a totally frozen frame...

Somebody once said to me that if there's a total absence of sky in a photo, it must have been taken in England; and here you have that phenomena used to the advantage of the minimalist theme! It was taken whilst my OH was throwing bread to black-headed gulls by the River Thames on a very snowy day, so the absence of sky really is absolute. For the purposes of this challenge I have added a light frame around the shot to offset the white background of Steemit's pages.

Olympus C-70 Zoom at f4.0 and a shutter speed of 1/160 second, allowing just enough blur on the bird's wingtips to bring a touch of movement and dynamism to the shot. ISO is 80, and focal length 24.3mm.

You can view my 1st Entry 'Run, Brahma, Run!' here

You can view my 2nd Entry 'Orange Peel' here

Photo-story addendum - here's the man in question feeding the gulls which led to this shot!