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Birds and Cameras   07/01/25

Working on this website has caused me to dive back into bird photography, something I started around a year ago but which slowly faded into the background.
It's not as if I stopped loving birds in that past year, if anything my new found love for the avian has only grown.
In the weeks over christmas I saw so many birds that brought me joy; I just didn't photograph them.
Obviously to some this is a good thing and I have subscribed to that view at points, birds (and whatever else you might love to observe) are beautiful and natural parts of our world; is it not enough just to see them?
A small meditative moment with a kingfisher perching over the waters of my hometown lake, the rush of jumping up to see a flock of long-tailed tits swarming the birdfeeder out of my window on a frosty evening.



These moments are important to me and they are enough but parallel to my love of birds is my love of photography which goes back much further, back to my studies in college.
Back in 2016 when I got my first DSLR as a gift from my dad I would photograph landscapes and then cityscapes, I discovered my art over two years in education studying the works of Joel Meyerowitz and Ansel Adams.
Past those years in formal education I learned to appreciate film photography through pinhole cameras in monster energy cans and passed down minolta's.




In 2023 I started taking photos of birds I saw in my local pond. I had just moved to London and started anxiety medication and these creatures grounded me and reminded me of home.
Over the next weeks and months I slowly learned not only how to take great photos of birds using the correct shutter speeds and apertures but also how to identify and recognise my biogeographic neighbours.
The book How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell taught me how to take the time to appreciate and acknowledge my natural surroundings. From this I learned the songs of the robin and the blackbird and the plumage of the magpie (my favourite bird) and the moorhen.
At first I didn't know what to do with my bird photos, I was proud of them but they mostly sat unedited on my hard drive or sd card. Eventually I started posting them on Unsplash which gave me bouts of dopamine but ultimately left me unsatisfied.




Besides sharing photos with a small handful of friends this was where my bird photography journey ended until I started work on this website in December of 2024. Having a place to share the things I make devoid of any manipulative social features allowed me to re-explore a number of interests such as my fiction writing and of course my photography.
In posting a dozen of my favourite photos here I found myself finally editing the shots that had languished on my PC, I opened camera raw and found myself lost in editing my photos of herons, geese and jays.
As of today I have even charged up my dslr ready to head outside and find more snapshots of the biogeographic neighbourhood in my tiny little corner of London.
I hope to share some more photos with you soon (if it wasn't so cold outside!)

~Meesey <3