Shooting by instinct

I spent ages this morning trying to make an image at Barns Ness with a derelict house on the foreground and an interesting sky above a very distant headland. Even trying to set it up with a telephoto lens involved some clambering about to find the ideal shooting position. But the images when I processed them on the computer looked very lack lustre largely because the lighting on the landscape was so flat and that interesting bit of sky was miles away.

Much to my surprise this afternoon when I was talking the dogs a walk by the sea wall, a sudden shaft of late afternoon sun lit up the beach and the gulls on the distance sand bar glistened white like confetti and almost by instinct I took a couple with my compact taking little time to compose or think about the technicalities or exposure of the shot. Much the better image ! In the end I have to concede that fundamentally it is the lighting that makes photos work.

Worht seeing LARGE to see the birds and detail