Watering Hole

Project Description

My final project is inspired by the aestheticism of wildlife, or more specifically, bird photography. I have decided to use photographs that I have compiled since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, in mid-summer 2020 up to 2022–of birds that have visited the bird bath and feeders in the front yard of the house I was living in at the time. I had only moved to this house in Stony Brook in November 2019, 4 months before the pandemic halted life as everyone had known it, so in spite of not being able to become very familiar with the community for quite some time, I instead drew my attention to the variety of Northeastern birds that I was able to attract to my yard with water, seeds, fruit and suet. In a “meta” sense, these photographs represent a pandemic pass time that I picked up, just as millions of other people found novel ways to occupy their time and interest in a private sphere. Where I recently moved, there is an almost total absence of birds which makes it impossible for me to recreate these photographs I took over these past two years on my newer manually-adjustable camera, but I think that using these older photographs makes them more valuable in that they demarcated a specific time, place and social context that has since dissipated.

Outcomes

I plan to include at least 10 photographs, some of which will be cropped down to bring the main focus to the subject, the bird(s) in each image. There will be a variety of bird species, in various poses and locations around my yard. I want for the viewer to be able to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of each of the birds, comparing their sizes, colorings, and mannerisms as one moves from image to image.

Methods & Materials

I took these photographs on a Fujifilm camera, using my tripod at times. Some photographs required zooming in up to 30x so as not to startle the birds. I plan to edit these images using Camera Raw so that I can sharpen them and bring out the vibrant colors of the birds.

References

Poem from The Second Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling, 1895

“The stream is shrunk—the pool is dry, And we be comrades, thou and I; With fevered jowl and dusty flank Each jostling each along the bank; And by one drouthy fear made still, Forgoing thought of quest or kill. Now ‘neath his dam the fawn may see, The lean Pack-wolf as cowed as he, And the tall buck, unflinching, note The fangs that tore his father’s throat. The pools are shrunk—the streams are dry, And we be playmates, thou and I, Till yonder cloud—Good Hunting!—loose The rain that breaks our Water Truce.”

Glenn Bartley, Bird Photographer

Stephen Green-Armytage, Photographer