I'm not a photographer. I should make that clear at the outset. And I have great sympathy for proper exponents of the craft. Nowadays we're all photographers, able to point and click with impunity – in my case that should really read 'point, fumble, swear and click' – knowing that if we throw enough metaphorical digital mud at the metaphorical photographic wall, some of it will stick. For someone who really knows what they're doing, that must be exasperating, to say the least.
Even though I'm not a photographer (I really can't say it often enough), I do now have a camera. I bought it a couple of weeks ago, overcoming a lifetime's fear as I did so. Fear of jargon, fear of buttons, fear of not knowing what the hell I was doing. It had occurred to me that if I wanted to identify some of the more fleeting bird sightings that were beginning to be annoyingly common as I pursued those flighty so-and-sos up and down the country, having a photograph of something, anything, might be a good idea. Then I could analyse the photos at my leisure and make a more authoritative identification. I'd also become frustrated by the limitations imposed by my phone when it came to photographing birds. My phone's camera is unfeasibly good, all things considered, but birds are stubborn beggars, and as far as I can tell there are only two ways to photograph them successfully:
- Get very close to them
- Have excellent gear so you don't have to do 1.
I am not good at 1. Birds, as I think should be clear by now, disappear. So that leaves 2.
But excellent gear is (a) expensive and (b) heavy. So when my friend Andrew, my birding mentor throughout this project, suggested I buy a bridge camera, I paused only to Google 'bridge camera bird photography' before buying one.
That's not quite true. I read two online reviews of the top result. One of them said it was brilliant, the other said it was rubbish. That, in these days of universal platforms for anyone with a keyboard and a quarter-baked opinion, amounted to a good balance. Don't ask me which camera I bought. It has a silly name and a pile of random numbers. That's good enough for me.
I have since thrown enough photographic mud at the wall to knock the damn thing down. I append two of the results. The first, of a skylark perched on a post behind Chesil Beach at an unfeasibly early hour the other day, is, I think, quite successful – not least because it flew off a second after the picture was taken, thus both proving and disproving the core concept of my book, that birds disappear at the sight of me. The second is, predictably enough, an unidentified bird that had obviously heard about me in advance. That photo has, I believe, a beauty of its own, representing as it does the hopelessness of the human condition and the fleeting nature of all life.
Incidentally, before you get to the photos themselves, I should reiterate my gratitude to you for supporting this project. It means a great deal, and is rather humbling. That's another thing I really can't say often enough.
