Gulls Two

The trick to gull photography is going where there are hundreds of gulls flying around, pointing your camera in that general direction, and shooting photos until your index finger goes limp.

I don't want to be immodest here, but you should know the truth. About fifteen minutes into the photo shoot, I made an astonishing – perhaps revolutionary – breakthrough in the science of gull photography. More birds means more photos, I realized. I needed to steal the gulls away from the other, less Type-A tourists. The solution was popcorn, which I immediately purchased and started throwing. It worked – the gulls abandoned the others and swarmed me. Ah, sweet success.

But just like Da Vinci and Edison before me, I soon understood that such light-speed progress brings problems of its own. It's very difficult to throw popcorn and snap pictures at the same time, especially when the popcorn is sold in a conical container that narrows to a point at the bottom, and thus will not sit quietly on the railing.

Salvation came in the form of a Lebanese couple, both doctors, who saw me bumbling between my camera and the popcorn and took pity. Soon the doctors were enthusiastically lofting popcorn and I was snapping away. We continued that way for what might have been a half-hour.

An epochal length of time stretches between the twitch of your finger and the click of the shutter. A bird could fly the length of a school bus in that lazy moment. So there's no aiming for gulls. You shoot at the air, and the gulls swoop down and pose, or they don't. In about 80% of shots, they don't. These are the other 20%.















Enlarge this one. The gull on the far right is looking at me. He's on to me!












There's the popcorn.

Creek all week

A month or so ago, I took a stroll along Dubai's creek. It's a river-like piece of water, though it's really just a jutting inlet of the Persian Gulf. I got enough decent pictures to fill up a week on this website.

Each day I'll post some more. Because there are quite a few – I mean really, there are a lot – I'm going to set the main page to post only one day at a time. Otherwise it will load so slowly, it would be quicker for you to just fly here and see the Creek yourself. So if you haven't checked the site every day – and yes, you are forgiven for that – be sure to check out the list of posts on the right side of the screen.

Every picture here is clickable for a bigger view. Best thing to do is right-click the picture and select "Open in New Window." Some of these are, by far, my favorite photos I've taken since I got here.

Gulls One

The rest of my Creek pictures are of one subject: the lovely hovering gulls along the creekside.

First, let me pull back the curtain for one second. The selection of photographs on this website is heavily edited. For every picture I post here, there are about four or so that I trash – sometimes more. It's sort of sad when you think about it… such torrential editing should mean that the remaining photos are really something special, and this is plainly not the case. Oh well. As Scott so eloquently said, your alternative is the Burger King. That still cracks me up, Scott!

Anyway, usually I'm cutting photos left and right. So, you will soon be asking yourself, why the hell am I posting 25 photos on a single topic, each almost precisely like the last? Let's just answer that with total honesty: I love these pictures so much that I simply decided to temporarily abandon my function as editor. F*©& it, I said to myself. I'm posting themall.

I swear, I think I was a bird in a previous life. I can't watch most sports games on TV for more than thirty seconds without getting bored, but I could have watched these gulls fly all day long. All that swooping around... it just looks like so much fun!

No one ever loved life more than I do. But I could give it all up to be a bird again.

























Tomorrow… more cowbell. So to speak.

On the water

When it got dark, the Creekside emptied. I paid a boater a few bucks to boat me around for a while. He offered me some fried nuggets, then put his jacket over his head, like this:



What was in the nuggets? I do not know. They were spicy, very spicy nuggets.

This was our view as we pulled off the bank:



The water-level view gave a better perspective on some of the buildings, including the Pregnant Lady. Many of these pictures are blurry. Staying absolutely still is harder than you would think on a boat rocking greasily to and fro.











You have certain moments where it hits you all over again how far away you are. I started to feel that sense of surreality, giddy and strange, towards the end of the boat ride. These next photos – not the photos, but actually seeing these things – seemed especially otherworldly to me that evening:

Creek folk

The western bank of the Creek hosted all sorts of characters, including the Thinker…



…and the Boat Maker.



In fact all sorts of craftsmen were working. These boat makers are Omanis (you can tell by their caps, and their love of boats).



This guy was Palestinian:



And this one was Egyptian:





I bought some Syrian glass that looks like this:



People played with their babies…



…and watched the birds.



In the photo below, the couple on the left was Lebanese. They later helped me with my own bird photography adventures. More on that… Thursday.

Creek architecture

They call this one "The Pregnant Lady."










The Rolex buildings…


…in the sun.


A mosque in the Iranian style. A little Iranian village abuts the Creek here. It's one of the oldest things in Dubai.