Rock Pigeon Surprise
These turn out not to be pictures of birds, really. I mean, of course they are photographs that have birds in them, but I uncovered all kinds of interesting details when I got them into Lightroom.
Specifically, they have Rock Pigeons in them. Yes, these are your garden (well, city park, anyway) variety pigeons. There is a dropping of pigeons that live near my new office in West Newton. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they fly around in circles here too. Except it’s pretty wierd to see when there’s nothing around under them for reference. It looks a bit daft. These pigeons are also not very graceful flyers. Their wings are really high up on the body and they tend to look like they are going to just drop at any moment.
But anyway.
This loft of pigeons was hanging out on top of the garage across from the office. Now this is at least five stories up, say, 20 meters and across the access road from where I am standing with the equivalent of a 320mm lens (about 6.5x magnification). That makes for some tough shooting. And why would you bother with a passel of pigeons anyway?
For this.
This was not an easy photograph to get. It’s one of the rare situations where I really should have been using an image stabilizer. This is exactly the situation where they come in really handy. As it was, I kept the aperture fairly open and took advantage of the bright conditions to get a reasonably fast shutter speed. I probably needed at least one stop faster, though – this photo is softer than I’d like and freezing the motion a bit more would help.
But those are technical details. I’m not sure I’ve figured out all the artistic and metaphorical meanings in this picture yet. It’s kind of strange to take a picture, and then look at it, and not know what it means.
I got this photograph (a whole series, actually, but only maybe four keepers) because I had the camera trained on the pigeons the whole time hoping they would fly off. When they did, I followed them with the camera. So it’s back to hard work and patience. Yes, I had to stand there with a very heavy camera and lens pointed at the sky for a few minutes.
The most surprising detail in the photograph, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, is a very striking perspective effect. With the birds as a reference, you are clearly looking at an edifice or balustrade on an outside corner. However, if you focus more on the bright triangle in the lower center of the picture, it also looks like an inside corner. I don’t think it flips the meaning of the photograph, I just think all these things add up to present a very rich set of ways of looking at the birds. You can look at them from a head-on perspective, or from a slant via the shadows (the shadows of all four flying birds appear in the picture). They can be flying over the edge of a building or flying over the opening to a structure.
Then you’ve got the two other pigeons. One is light and one is dark. They are either looking over at whatever the birds are flying towards, but then again, they could be on a down escalator.
So a lot of things are very strange. I don’t think this is the final cut, though. Now that I more fully understand this perspective (I’ve shot it once before and seen the impact) I am able to visualize some images that exploit it. So I’m excited about the possibility of using this experience to visualize and take pictures that use it as an artistic device in a more deliberate manner.
The engineer in me, however, says that I need to look at this photograph more. The most interesting experiments are often the ones that don’t go as planned. So I think I need to look at this one a bit more to see what else shakes loose.
Then, later, I took this one. I didn’t post it to talk about the pigeons, although a little visible motion can have a huge impact with creatures like birds. It’s the two UFOs in the picture. I got this picture the same way I got the previous one, by waiting with the camera on the spot. I took multiple shots on full-auto. The small white object at the top and the other roughly circular object below the left-hand pigeon were not in the previous frame. But they are in this and at least two other frames. The pigeons seemed unaffected. They flew off over my head, actually. Well above it, but over it. I think the lower object is an insect of some kind and the upper one is perhaps a fluffy seed pod or something. I figure the top one was on a wing and got shaken off (perhaps the same for the other, who knows).
I’m always interested when things like this show up unexpectedly. If you take a lot of pictures outdoors, particularly if there is a lot of sky in the background, you are going to get some pictures with bugs in them. Expecially if you are zooming in a bit. Whatever these two tidbits were, they were in or close enough to the plane of focus to render well.
If you flip from photo to photo in Lightroom, you can see an animation sequence. This is the first frame they appear in. Neither moves as if gravity is the dominant force. The lower spot stays in a similar position, i.e., it hovers. The upper spot has a range of position visible in the photo series, but ultimately doesn’t really fall.
