Fishing afternoon

The story behind the photo

A grey heron waiting for a fish on the Lac des Ibis at Le Vésinet, perched on a tangle of half-submerged roots, with an ivy-covered bank behind him and rain touching the surface of the water. The frame is vertical and close, so the bird has a column of his own and the eye reads him from the beak down to the feet gripping the wood.

Everything in this picture is a question of weight and balance. A heron is a very large bird standing on almost nothing, and the roots beneath him are a mess of thin, wet, unstable lines. I framed low enough to keep them whole, because they explain the effort involved in doing nothing.

The light is soft and grey, the light of a rainy afternoon, and it is the right light for this bird. Sun on a heron produces a hard, chalky white and destroys the blue; under cloud the plumage recovers its real colour, that slate grey-blue with the black crest and the yellow eye.

Herons wait longer than any photographer can. You arrive, you set up, you wait, and after forty minutes you understand which of you is the impatient one. The rain started during that wait and I stayed, which is the only reason this frame exists. I wanted to photograph patience itself, and the small circles the rain was drawing around it.