Birds Taking Flight: Some Chronophotography Narratives

Chronophotography – taking a sequence of images to portray motion – has been around since the mid-nineteenth century. More recently though Spanish photographer Xavi Bou has been making wonderful composite images of birds in flight: he calls them Ornithographies. My own experiments with this style started in early 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I sat on the stoop in our garden and taught myself how to get shots of the sunbirds arriving at, and departing from, our bird feeder – it was at the height of a five year long drought so they were frequent visitors. Here’s one of them: it shows a Double Collared Sunbird diving down and away from the feeder. It’s a composite of eight frames taken as the bird launched itself: I’ve stretched out the final flight path as it was highly concertinered.

This Lesser Striped Swallow was perched on a thorn twig for quite a while before it took off and was very quickly gone out of the frame. It’s another image taken during the COVID-19 pandemic but a little later when we were allowed to travel within the Province – so we went to Ganora Guest Farm where we have been regular visitors for many years.

I took the last image in summer this year. The Red-winged Starlings had been perching on the roof gutter before dashing across to grab some fruit from our grapevine. This is a shot of their typical flight path: first downwards and then beating strongly up.

All of the images are composites. I’ve been using the Pro Capture High mode on my Olympus cameras and that takes 60 frames per second – so each composite is around a tenth of a second – or maybe less – in flight duration.

I have some of these in print ready for my first exhibition in the Orchard Gallery Hogsback later this year.