Cormorant trio
- 📍 Location: Parc du Marquenterre, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
Three cormorants crossing above the Parc du Marquenterre at the end of the day, with the tops of the autumn trees below them and a sky already turning to mauve. The frame is vertical, which is a deliberate refusal: birds in flight are almost always photographed wide, and the verticality here forces the eye to travel from the canopy up into the sky, exactly as the birds did.
They are small in the picture and they are meant to be. What I wanted was the proportion between three dark commas and the enormous quiet of the estuary at dusk, not a portrait of a cormorant. The burnt orange of the trees at the bottom, thrown out of focus, does the work of a ground line: without it the birds would float in an abstraction, with it the picture has a place.
The light at that hour at Marquenterre is entirely indirect. The sun has gone behind the dunes and what remains is a pink and grey wash that flattens everything and removes contrast, and the only things that survive it are silhouettes.
I remember the sound of the wingbeats better than the sight of them. Cormorants fly heavily and in a straight line, with the stubbornness of birds that know precisely where they are going, and there is something oddly reassuring in watching a species commute. My intention was a landscape with birds in it rather than a wildlife photograph: the hour, the colour, the height, and three passengers.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
