Portraits of Birds
July 18, 2024
I’ve been thinking a lot about doing more bird photography, and more specifically about taking portraits of birds. This idea came to me when I was browsing the bookshelves of a roadside antique shop in Maine while on vacation, and I came upon the book ‘Birds of North America by Eliot Porter’, a book of bird photographs that was published in 1972.
Unlike most nature photographers, Eliot Porter created portraits of the birds that he photographed—he lit the scenes, positioned his subjects, and to a certain degree even directed the birds themselves.
You see, I have a rather specific definition of what constitutes a portrait, and most close-up photos of birds simply do not meet my criteria. I believe that for a photograph to be a portrait, the subject must be aware that they are being photographed by the photographer, and the photographer must be in control of their subject, in that they instruct them as to how they want them to pose or where to look.
Eliot Porter’s bird photography ticks those boxes for me, as he would usually find himself an active bird’s nest, and would then construct a ‘set’ in which he’d set up lights, a tripod and camera, and he would only take his portrait when the parent returned to the nest. The birds are aware that all this gear has been set up and that it’s quite out of the ordinary (they may not know they’re being photographed, more like at the very least they know they’re being watched, but they want to feed their babies anyway, so they half-heartedly ’consent’ to being photographed). The frame of what will become the photograph is also pre-determined, and the bird is (in-a-way) guided into said frame, because the bird wants to have somewhere to perch where it will have the ability to bend down and place food into the beaks of its young. And as for where the bird is to look in the portrait, that also gets decided by the photographer, based on where the lights are set up. In some of his portraits, like the one that’s on the cover of his book, the bird actually looks right at the camera (even if only because it was probably startled by the firing of the flash!)
This all got me thinking. I mean… I go birding in and around Ottawa almost every day. I’m obsessed with listing the species that I find using eBird, and I love gazing at them with wonder through my binoculars, but… I almost never bring a camera with me—mostly because I don’t really long to create photographs that are merely a record of me ‘having seen a bird’. I’m a professional portrait photographer, and I pride myself in creating portraits of my subjects that have my ‘stamp’ on the photo. I ask my subjects if I may photograph them, I decide how (and in front of what) they’ll be posed, and I instruct them as to where to look (and how to look) so that I can create the type of photograph that’s true to my vision as a portrait photography artist.
I must say, though, that I loved Eliot Porter’s book, and I thought to myself that I, too, could create portraits of birds and I could do it in a way that would be a bit more ‘me’ than setting up a bunch of gear near a bird’s nest! Moreover, it occurred to me that I had already created a ‘prototype’ bird portrait that could be the first of many images that could one day become a series of bird portraits that I could indeed be very happy with.
I took this portrait back in July of 2011, and I posed this bird by playing the call of a male of its own species, using the speaker on my iPhone, with my iPhone positioned just out of frame.
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