Bud perch

The story behind the photo

A blue tit at Le Pecq, on a bare branch at the very end of winter, holding the diagonal of the frame while the buds beside it have not yet opened. The background is almost white, an overcast sky reduced to a flat field of nothing; against it the branch draws a clean line and the bird supplies the only saturated colour in the picture.

The composition is deliberately minimal. There is no foliage, no second perch, no depth to speak of; only a diagonal, a bird and two or three buds that place the scene precisely in the calendar. A photograph of a blue tit in summer would be a photograph of a bird. A photograph of a blue tit among unopened buds is a photograph about waiting.

Grey skies are usually treated as a failure of conditions. Here the flat light does the work: it removes every shadow from the plumage, so the blue of the cap and the yellow of the belly come through at their full value, and it turns the sky into a neutral ground of the kind a studio would take an hour to build.

These birds weigh eleven grams and behave as if they weighed nothing. They never stop moving, and the whole art of photographing them lies in predicting the branch they will choose next.

My intention was to keep the picture almost empty, and to let one small blue and yellow animal be the arrival of spring.