With my conceptual photography I will often spend several days building a set and sorting out lighting before the model arrives. However the majority of this time is not spent actually shooting.
The creation of my Birdlady image was completely different in that it involved seven days of actual shooting and many hundreds of images.
I am not sure where the concept came from but I definitely wanted to create an image of someone representing Mother Nature surrounded by birds. I also wanted to incorporate some metal rings that had originally come from a wine barrel.
The first task was to photograph the birds which to me was somewhat of an unusual challenge. I have shot them on many previous occasions but I cannot say that I’m overly good at it.
I knew that would have to clearcut the birds out of their background so I tried to make it as simple as possible. In our backyard I set up a frame in front of our old garage that has plain walls. From the crossbar I placed a feeder and then suspended the ring below it. I figured that birds would land on the ring before going up to the feeder.
My Lumix G9 can shoot timelapse so I thought I would use this feature to get my shots. I positioned the camera on a tripod located inside of our double garage. The G9 is a micro 4/3 camera which meant that they reach of the lens was double its setting. was working on the theory that with the camera in the garage the birds would not be disturbed.
That theory proved to be true but the overall experiment was a disaster. During the time that the timelapse was running, the camera shot around 1,200 photos but when I reviewed them I discovered that only three had birds actually in them.
On day two I tried again but this time I set behind the camera and photographed. This guy gave me a much better hit rate but I was still not seeing large numbers of birds I came to the conclusion that the strings were perhaps putting them off.
On day three I tried something different and I moved the birdfeeder to the end of the garage and I also changed cameras to my full frame Nikon D600. This time I had much greater numbers of birds coming but now I realised that these images were going to be much harder to work with. I figured that shooting in front of the plain wall was ideal but that I needed to improve where the feeder was located. I also realised that having the ring positioned higher up was going to cause a problem in matching the perspectives when it came to create the composite.
So on the afternoon of day three I built a stand for the feeder that also enabled the ring to be positioned without the need for strings. The rig also meant that I could set the height of the tripod and the ring so that I did not have issues with perspective.
On Day four, the new set up was put into action. I also realised that I did not need to hide myself. Rather if I stayed still the birds would ignore me. So I positioned myself halfway across the driveway with the camera set on a tripod that was triggered remotely. While the shutter did make a noise the birds got used to it.
In order to try to encourage birds onto the ring I used peanut butter and glued seed to it. This was not overly successful.
After about 30 minutes or taking photos I thought that I had some definite ones that I could use. once they were loaded in light room a classified them based on where I thought they would fit in the image. That lead me to the conclusion that I still needed some images specifically birds in flight.
So on the morning of day five I was back in the seat with the same camera set up but now focused on only shooting flying birds. I had pushed the shutter speeder to 1/800 of a second. I also positioned LED light just out of shot to brighten up the wall slightly. Again this was to make cutting out the birds as easy as possible.
That night I did a very quick composite in Photoshop to see what multiple birds looked like. I was pleased with the result and figure that we were now in a position to move onto the model shoot.
The one thing that I was not sure of was how I was going to incorporate the wings that I wanted my main character have. I knew that I could not use any of the images I had shot as those birds were simply too small for it to be realistic. I had contemplated going in Te Papa Museum and photographing one of the stuffed birds.
That proved to be not necessary. When we returned from a Saturday morning walk I discovered that a young thrush had flown into our bedroom windows and broken its neck in the process. Before I disposed of the body I positioned it on a black piece of card and insured that the light direction matched how I had photographed the birds.
In part two we will cover the shoot with Rachel.
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