Red eye
- 📍 Location: Grands-Laviers, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
A black-necked grebe on the ponds of Grands-Laviers, in the Somme, in full breeding plumage: black head, chestnut flank, and that spray of golden feathers behind the eye that the bird raises and lowers like a fan. The frame is tight and the horizon has been left out, so the picture is reduced to a bird, its reflection and a field of moving water.
Everything here depends on one detail, and the title names it. The eye of this grebe is a deep red, and against the black of the head it is the only point in the photograph where the gaze can settle. I framed for it. The rest of the composition, the diagonal of the ripples, the balance between the dark mass of the body and the pale water, exists to lead back to a spot smaller than a lentil.
The light is soft and lateral, the light of a spring morning under a high overcast, and it is the only light that will hold both the black head and the bright water in the same exposure.
Grands-Laviers is not a wilderness. It is a set of restored gravel ponds a few kilometres inland from the estuary, and that is part of what I like about it. Extraordinary birds come to ordinary places, and they do not know that a landscape is supposed to be spectacular.
I wanted a straight portrait, at eye level, of a bird wearing the most improbable plumage of its year and behaving as though it were nothing.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
