Blue egret
- 📍 Location: Lac du Der, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
A little egret at the Lac du Der, walking through water so deep and so blue that the picture appears to have no bottom. The bird is small, white and alone in a field of pigment, doubled by a reflection that hangs beneath it without quite touching. Almost the entire frame is one colour.
I framed it wide and empty on purpose. There was a temptation to move closer and make a portrait of the egret, and the picture would have been worth much less: the subject here is not the bird but the proportion between a very small white shape and a very large blue one. That proportion is the whole emotion of the place.
The blue is the reservoir returning a cloudless sky at an hour when the sun no longer reaches the water directly. It needs no saturation, only an exposure set low enough to protect the white of the plumage, which also deepens everything around it. Photographing white on blue is a balancing act with no margin: half a stop too much and the bird disappears into a blank shape.
The Lac du Der is a man-made lake, dug in the 1970s to keep the Marne from flooding Paris, and it has become one of the great bird crossroads of Europe. I find that reversal moving, an engineering decision that turned into a sanctuary.
I wanted a print that is mostly water, and a bird you have to find.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
