Second of two parts
Like a lot of self-taught bird photographers, I learned mostly by trial and error. In those first few years my photos, to be blunt, were mostly worthless.
My skills improved with time, but I picked up a habit from those early days that has stuck with me: I found that if I took enough shots — like the proverbial monkey at the typewriter — a few might turn out well.
That habit is one reason why confronting my sprawling and unwieldy library — now loaded with more than a quarter million photos — felt so daunting. When we moved to a new place recently with more walls space than ever before, I decided to put up a gallery of favorite shots – if I could find my way through them all.
What might sound like a mind-numbing project ended up far more rewarding than I expected. First I turned to artificial intelligence to bring order to the library’s chaos. When I wrote the first post about that experience it stirred a clamor – including plenty of skeptical comments — about whether AI should have any place in helping managing bird photography
What makes a good photo
This second post takes up the more elevated question and maybe the most basic in bird photography: What makes a good photo in the first place? What should an image get across about these remarkable creatures, their beauty, their acrobatics, their environments?
On the one hand, you usually know a good photo when you see one. But the more it’s possible to define what makes it worthy, the better the chances of meeting those standards when you’re out chasing birds.
Scattered throughout this post are the photos I’m posting on my walls, along with some explanations for why they made the cut. As a part of this experiment, I’ve continued consulting the AI programs I used to help bring order to my library. What can a chatbot bring to these choices? One of the key AI programs I’ve been using surveyed 25 million photography elements in assessing what the world’s best photographers know about bird photos. That’s a goldmine of feedback that’s hard to pass up.
I also took a tour of guidance from some of the best photographers out there and what they see as the ingredients of excellence in bird photography.
Looking at photos differently
This project changed how I look at my own work. As you can see from scrolling through the photos spread across this website, a great many take aim at the action of birds – takeoffs, landings, soaring and diving. Others are chiefly focused on the beauty of birds, their most colorful and picturesque moments.
Those are fine attributes, but they may leave out other parts of a bird’s story, including the environment surrounding the bird, the mood and tones of a photo, its more subtle actions that help reveal what a bird is up to. These elements forced me to look at photos differently and to consider some images I might not have in the past.
A good example is this moody photo above of a band of Great Egrets. I was trying to catch the birds as they came in for landings on a pond in South Carolina when I noticed this group off on a dark edge of the water and took a few shots. Only when I came across the series during editing later did I realize how compelling this quiet, painting-like moment might be.
This next photo down I caught with the help of that habit of taking lots of shots. While following dozens of hummingbirds feeding in Costa Rica, I happened to capture this hummingbird zipping through a column of flowers. It’s not a particularly sharp image, but I love the feel of the speed against the colors of these blossoms that feed the birds.
The shot of a Great Blue Heron watching over its offsprings at the top of a palm tree was shot on a windy day in north Florida. The adult’s stringy mating plumage is whipping around in the wind and the young bird appears to be complaining about the unpleasant weather. To me, it’s an image of parenthood: steadfast, protective, enduring.
I still ended up with plenty of birds in flight, but I hope these photos do more than simply freeze the action.
The Eastern Meadowlark leaping into a full flight below could be the symbol of speed. The diving pelican is a simple shot that to me shows the dramatic acrobatics that coastal birds must master to find food. And I love the Roseate Spoonbill at the top of this post for its contrast of the green and pink colors and the breadth of the bird’s outstretched wings.
Photos that bring a smile
Occasionally, you catch a light-hearted moment. The White Pelican, huddled with peers in the shallows of coastal Florida, shows off its enormous beak (hard not to think of the famous ditty about a pelican’s beak holding more than its belly can.) And this Orange-footed Tanager, further down the page, dripping with water, couldn’t look any more miserable in a scene that always makes me smile.
You can judge for yourself how well these photos meet the standards the experts give for photography. Donna Brok, a long-time wildife photographer and judge for the North American Nature Photography Association, summarized what many had to say.
“Images can communicate meaning through composition, focus, focal length, tone, and light. A good image also conveys a mood that helps viewers find a meaning in what the photographer is trying to say,” she said. “When I look at work of others, I look for a personal handprint, something that makes an image unique, powerful, or interesting. I look for emotion, intensity, passion, and purpose in the image.”
There are lots of ways of looking at photos, of course. As the famous photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, put it. “I like my photography straight, unmanipulated, devoid of all tricks — a photograph living through its own inherent qualities and revealing its own spirit.”
What did the Chatbots think?
Part of my goal in putting together this post was to see how my own instincts compared with those of the AI research tool Excire that built its own list of my best photos, as I wrote about in the earlier post. The 15 photos you see here included a handful from the Excire choices, but the lists didn’t agree on others. I think the differences reflect how tough it is to reach any consensus on such a subjective topic.
The value in this exercise for me — and I think for any bird photographer — may be widening what I’m looking for and trying to build that into my instincts when the moment of the shot comes up. You don’t usually have much time to think when you’re about to press the shutter. Legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made that point in a famous comment decades ago:
“There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. And oops, if you miss it, it’s gone forever.”
That brings us back to the habit of taking a lot of shots when a good picture is possible. I’ve cut down from those early days, but still don’t hesitate to take plenty of photos. The beauty of digital photography is there isn’t much cost in pressing the shutter, except for the work of editing afterwards. But even that, I’ve learned, can teach you a thing or two.
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