My final project, Watering Hole, is a representation of a hobby, that I picked up like millions of other people had done to occupy themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Idle and growing tired of staying inside, I decided that I would learn what kinds of birds were native to the Stony Brook area, and photograph them coming to my yard. Month after month of surveillance, my camera, and the help of an app called Merlin Bird ID that was designed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, I became familiar with about two dozen species that would regularly come by to feed and bathe in my birdbath. The following images are of the species that I enjoyed photographing the most, some because of their striking colors, and others because of their personalities that are reflected in things such as a stance full of attitude, or a comically big beak.
Process:
I spent a lot of time looking through the photographs that I’ve taken since I began photographing birds during quarantine, and a good amount of them were not up to par in terms of clarity, lighting, or composition. I’ve found photographing a subject as “flighty” as birds to be a test of patience, because you might find one outstanding image among hundreds of unusable ones. Since I approached the final project with using photographs that I’d already taken in the past couple of years, it was not a challenge to decide what to photograph, but to decide how to “curate” a sort of collection. I wanted to present people with the bird species that I enjoyed photographing the most, and I also wanted to portray the birds in dynamic, expressive postures and locations.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/mXiMJX7r2Fs1xCLJ8
After narrowing down dozens of contending photographs to eight, I edited them in Camera Raw. I wanted to leave the photographs as natural-looking as possible, so I just enhanced the tonal range of each image and corrected the white balance to bring out the vibrant colorings of the birds. With the intent of drawing more focus to the birds, I masked the backgrounds of most of the images and decreased the sharpness to create contrast between the backgrounds and the birds.
References:
“The stream is shrunk–” from How Fear Came, The Second Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling, 1895
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a British author and poet who wrote the classic children’s book, The Jungle Book. This poem precedes the first chapter of The Second Jungle Book, How Fear Came. In this poem Kipling describes the unspoken “water truce” between all of the animals in the jungle, predator and prey, during times of drought:
“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.”
This poem evokes imagery of animals of all kinds coming to a source of water and coexisting for a brief time, even enjoying each other’s company.
Glenn Bartley
Glenn Bartley is a Canadian wildlife photographer from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada who is best known for his intimately close and vibrant photographs of bird species that are notorious for eluding capture in a photograph. Bartley earned a MS in Ecological Restoration, yet has forged a decades long career of photographing birds on multiple continents, a passion that first began in his childhood. He uses a variety of Canon lenses and a tripod to obtain his crisp, frozen-in-time photos.
Stephen Green-Armytage
Stephen Green-Armytage is a photographer who is well-known for his published photo books such as Extraordinary Pigs, Extraordinary Chickens, Extraordinary Pigeons, among others. Green-Armytage poses his animal subjects in dramatic studio lighting and a vacuum of space that allows their beauty to dominate his photographs. His chickens may be comically flamboyant with their wild plumes of feathers, but the viewer can’t help but appreciate each chicken’s one-of-a-kind appearance.
