Things from the garden

The Rooks Project

Slideshow vid

This is part of a research project I’ve been doing for work over the last year. I started it with the vague idea of taking shots that captured the rookiness of rooks. I didn’t want clean BBC Wildlife Magazine style shots, impressive though that sort of wildlife photography is. But what I wanted was something less precise – I wanted their movement, their eccentricities, the endless ciphers and shape-shifts of rook flight, the way they come in under the radar like Stealth bombers, or swagger across the grass, or tumble in the wind like flakes of soot, or hunch on a branch, or gather in huge numbers to storm to and from their roosts. I want all the things that are anathema to conventional wildlife photographers: blur, burned out skies, unbalanced compositions, rooks skidding in like half-formed shadows at the edge of your vision.

 

The rest of the research project involves more rook photographs and explorations of representations of corvids in art and photography, the enculturation of corvids in mythology and folklore, and a comparative analysis of the history and conventions of orthodox wildlife photography.

 

I like my life :D 

Today in the Forest of Dean

Springtime

Everything unfurls, uncurls, folding out of the ground, still shy.

Doctor Who and the Daleks remix

I've been tagged by evil taggers

I've been "tagged", which apparently means I have to give one-word answers to a bunch of questions and tag seven other bloggers. I'm not sure I actually know seven other bloggers but here goes nothing. 

1. Where is your cell phone? Brokensville

2. Where is your significant other? Wiltshire

3. Your hair colour? Black

4. Your mother? Operatic

5. Your father? Chivalrous

6. Your favourite thing? Horizons

7. Your dream last night? Aerial

8. Your dream/goal? North

9. The room you’re in? Study

10. Your hobby? Sailing

11. Your fear? Enclosure

12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Outside

13. Where were you last night? Gullywith

14. What you’re not? Shrubbery

15. One of your wish-list items? Hasselblad

16. Where you grew up? Wild

17. The last thing you did? Coffee

18. What are you wearing? Fleece

19. Your TV? Silent

20. Your pet? Snoring

21. Your computer? Laptop

22. Your mood? Restless

23. Missing someone? Yes

24. Your car? Muddy

25. Something you’re not wearing? Armour

26. Favourite store? eBay

27. Your summer? Postponed

28. Love someone? Madly

29. Your favourite colour? Blue

30. When is the last time you laughed? Earlier

31. Last time you cried? Tuesday

I'm tagging: 

Lynn 

MG Harris

JE Stevens

David Bridger

I'll think of some more later :)

Rooks

There's a large rook colony in the park across the road. When you're among so many rooks everyday, you start noticing all sorts of things about them - the variety of their rough calls, their anarchic social behaviours, how they swagger across the grass, how they hurl themselves with wild abandon into the wind. I once watched a rook pick up a flattened Coke can and angle it to flash the sunlight for the amusement of an audience of gathered rooks. Rooks do what they must do to survive. The rest of the time they have fun.

"They came in widely spaced drifts like showers of black blossom, their movements wild and playful, the calls incessant. The mood was electric, exhilirating. It felt as if the change of seasons was happening before my very eyes and, in a sense, it was. I didn't try to make notes. It was too uncontrollable, too wild to contain. I simply stood back and watched" ~ Mark Cocker, Crow Country

"In our midst, a shape-shifter, a smallish, smooth-feathered glossy rook one moment, a strutting, baggy-feathered, almost large, self-important, angry one the next" ~ Esther Woolfson, Corvus: A Life With Birds

His wings are the stiff back of his only book,

Himself the only page - of solid ink.

~ Ted Hughes, Crowego

Photographing rooks

Sometimes I use a long telephoto lens but mostly I don't bother. The rooks around here are used to people and dogs milling around so you can get fairly close to them. They're also used to me pointing a camera at them because I've been photographing them for a couple of years now. And it helps if you speak to them and then just get on with taking the shot. Speaking to them seems to break some tension of suspicion - I don't know why but it works for me.

If you want crisp, sharp pictures you need a fast lens and a quick shutter speed. But I like motion blur too so I often use a medium to high f-stop to slow the shutter (see the top photograph).