Our hotel room had a balcony over the water. Every time we went out there, a savage gang of gulls would gather below. It was like the Hitchcock movie, “The Birds.” Day after day, the fearsome flock of menacing feathered delinquents demanded Cheese Doodles, and more Cheese Doodles. Fearing a reprisal of air bombings on our car windshields, we complied.

Unfortunately, those Doodles were like a blowtorch to gasoline! Almost as soon as we started tossing them off the balcony, we’d have a full-blown avian feeding frenzy on our hands. For almost a week, the deadly Doodle war raged on. Beaks were bent, police were called, arrests were made.

Anyway… I cropped this photo a bit to eliminate some distracting bits. Otherwise, I adjusted contrast and exposure. That’s it. I used no trickery to create the sense of motion. In fact, the image works primarily because of mistakes I made while shooting it. This seagull was in hot pursuit of a Cheese Doodle (the blurry yellow object extending from its beak is the Doodle in question). But I had mindlessly left my camera’s ISO speed set too slow to “freeze” the action. It also appears that I moved slightly downward while taking the photo, adding further to the effect. In most cases, these mistakes would doom a photo to the trash heap, but this time, my miscues actually enhanced the result. Sometimes you get lucky. Our windshields did got bombed, though.