Cormorant trio

The story behind the photo

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 mauve. The frame is vertical, a deliberate refusal: birds in flight are almost always photographed wide, and here the vertical format 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; only silhouettes survive it.

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.