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Local birds cavort against a watercolour sky. When I posted this to my original photoblog, doucy.net, in probably 2011, a friend commented (commenting on blogs!) “why?”. He shared later that he dabbled in photography before digital (well before), and that this is the kind of image you’d never commit your film to.
That mystifies me, though I do get the economy of choice that film *could* restrict you to. For me, the freezing of moments isn’t nearly as much of a “make an image” intentional process as it is a kind of “lifting out”, a “freezing” of a moment from the ongoing and everflow of visual magic we are constantly surrounded by (or, if you read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, the magical visual predictions we constantly simulate and refine for ourselves).
There’s something special about this lifting, and for me, this image captures that meta thought in the bird taking flight.
