Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/468



REAT was the interest raised not many years ago by a photograph containing what purported to be a solitary seagull, and not interest alone. Controversy amongst the experts alleged that it could not be a photograph direct from Nature; it might be the photograph of a dead gull, or a stuffed gull added to its background of waves, or it might be painted in by hand, but the only genuine gull in the case was the public, in believing such a thing possible. Since then, better lenses, shutters for rapid exposure, and, above all, the increased rapidity of the gelatino-bromide process, have combined to make the impossible of that day the practice of this, so that now a photographer with experience, under fairly favourable conditions, may depict not one, but many birds in flight, on a single plate. The chief difficulty is that of focusing an object constantly moving through widely varying planes. Such a photograph by the writer appeared in the June number of.

The flat sands of Southport make it almost