This document contains excerpts from various authors discussing different philosophies and approaches to photographing birds. It includes quotes about capturing birds in their natural habitat and environment, portraying their daily movements and behaviors, and how still photography can never fully capture the beauty of living birds. The excerpts reflect on themes of observing familiar things with new perspectives, expressing motion through still moments, and how successful art can rediscover beauty.

1. www.timcollierphotography.com

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Birds Eloquent
An Approach and Philosophy

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“Thoreau’s theme is not the remote and stupendous, but the daily and
hourly miracle of the usually unnoticed beauty that is close at hand.”
“What we need is, he felt, not the unfamiliar but the power to realise
that the familiar becomes unfamiliar once we really look at it, and that
every aspect of the natural world is in its own way “awful”.”
Joseph Wood Krutch - From the Introduction to “In Wilderness is the Preservation of the
World’ -1962 - Eliot Porter / Henry David Thoreau

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“Birds live in habitats.When seen in the field, they are part of
the great world around them which is their haunt”
“A photograph that is all bird - even if one or two close up
portraits are desirable in a series - and gives no impression of the
environment fails to achieve its full purpose”
G. K.Yeats 1947 - Bird Photography - 1946

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“The object of the bird-photographer should not only be to secure
portraits of the creatures he loves in stiff statuesque postures - the
living prototypes of the dwellers in glass cases.Though such are useful,
he should go further and try to portray the living bird in some
characteristic pose or action suggestive of its daily life, or else in some
unwonted and peculiar posture telling its own particular story.”
Bentley Beetham - Photography for Bird Lovers - 1911

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“To express dynamic motion through a static moment became for me
limited and unsatisfactory.The basic idea was to liberate myself from
this old concept and arrive at an image in which the spectator could
feel the beauty of a fourth dimension, which lies much more between
moments than within a moment. In music one remembers never one
tone, but a melody, a theme, a movement. In dance, never a moment,
but again the beauty of a movement in time and space.
Ernst Hass - 1950

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William Fiennes - The Snow Geese - 2002
“Sometimes whole flocks circled over the roost, thousands of geese
swirling round and round, as if the pond were the mouth of a drain and
these geese the whirlpool turing above it. Nothing had prepared me for
the sound, this dense, boisterous din, the clamour of a playground at
breaktime, a drone-thickness flecked with high pitched yells, squeals,
hollers and yawps - ....”

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“If the goal of art is Beauty and if we assume that the goal is sometime
reached, even if always imperfectly, how do we judge art? Basically, I
think, by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves
have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention.
Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us.”
Robert Adams - Beauty in Photography - 1996

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“The worst of it all is, that when a good photograph of any bird has
been obtained - as good, that is, as can be reasonably expected - or
even when it is the very best that can be possibly done by
photography, it falls so lamentably short of the beauty of the original”
R.B. Lodge - Pictures of Bird Life - 1904

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Collaboration - Dr. Mike Collier
www.mikecollier.eu

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www.timcollierphotography.com