“There are no new ideas – only new ways of making them felt.” Audre Lorde A male trumpeter swan and his mate were migrating north in late winter and chose to wait out a snowstorm on our pond. It was the first time we’d ever had swans. I spent the entire day shooting and got some keeper images including this sequence of the male fanning his wings. At first, I was trying to decide which one to frame and then it dawned on me that I had a beautiful motion study. It reminded me of Muybridge’s studies from the late 1800s which I had often referenced in my work as an animator. But these swan shots were also stand alone, great images. At first I arranged them side by side and had as many as six frames. Then the light bulb went off and I melded them into one. Ever since then I’ve kept an eye out for “Muybridge moments.”
It’s fun to photograph Chickadees. The other, bigger birds are always very wary around the feeders but not the little chickadees. They don’t care who’s around. They just want to eat and, if you’re in the way, they’ll just use you as an interim perch. They’re so small and fast, you never get to see the beauty of their wing forms as you can in the larger birds like herons or swans. So I baited a branch, set up the camera a few feet away, and focused on the food. They’d pop into frame and snatch some seed. Then I’d start shooting, as I panned ahead in the direction I “guessed” they might exit. Tricky timing. At first I ended up with a lot of empty backgrounds and just bits of bird in view. But gradually I got good enough at reading chickadee body language to snag a few keepers, including these shots that I combined to show three stages of lift off.
