Bokeh tit

The story behind the photo

A long-tailed tit at Le Pecq, perched on a horizontal branch in spring, with the first buds breaking around it and everything behind it dissolved into warm green and white. The title says bokeh, and the background is indeed the second subject here: the blossom has been thrown so far out of focus that it becomes weather rather than vegetation, a sort of luminous fog with the bird sitting inside it.

The composition is simple and old: a horizontal branch, a bird placed slightly off centre, space in front of it in the direction it is facing. What matters is the tension between the softness of everything else and the precision of the eye, the beak and the black stripe over the brow, the only sharp elements in the frame.

The light is oblique and late, and it enters from behind the foliage rather than falling on it, which gives the greens that inner glow instead of a surface shine. It also lights the edges of the feathers and separates a very pale bird from a very pale background, something no frontal light would have done.

Long-tailed tits are among the lightest birds in Europe, eight or nine grams, a ball of feathers with a stick attached. Watching one hold a branch in the wind is like watching a leaf decide not to fall.

I wanted a photograph made almost entirely of light, with just enough bird in it to give the light a reason.