Herring Spawn Aerial Abstract

This past April, I was fortunate enough to be in Alaska at the right time for the herring spawn. This is an aerial view that captures the effect of the deposition of the eggs and milt laid by millions of herring. In this view, the water has been colored white by that deposition. The dark areas within the white are either kelp or rocks. The dark mass on the left is a rocky beach. The white dots on the beach are the bodies of gulls which have come to feed on the herring and their eggs. The gulls give a bit of scale.

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Pertinent technical details or techniques: 1/1000, f/9 and ISO 450


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Richard, thanks for sharing this image. I think what’s so hard about this type of photography is scale. If you didn’t say anything about the seagull, I was not able to make sense of the scale. The kelp looks like fish and that greatly diminishes the impact from the scale. What a cool image.

This is really interesting. Even knowing the dots are seagulls, I am still having trouble with the scale. There is so much to see. Not sure if there are any fish that can be seen. What I first thought were fish could not be because they’d be too big. I love the waves and the various looks to the water. A very nice intriguing photo with a spot on title.

I love it… As an abstract. I love looking at these abstractly… and then you get to where you start looking closely. I suspect that in the full resolution image big enough and not on the internet… you could see the birds and start to get the scale… Thats what I love.