These images were taken with the
Introducing my Starling Murmuration Creative Photography project.
I’ve been working on this for 5 years or so - the project is now live in the current issue of @icmphotomag, and has also just been published in the recent issue of Amateur Photographer.
This is a study in chaos. Most Starling Murmuration projects I’ve seen tend to be things of gorgeous symmetrical beauty - wonderful swooping graceful curving fractals, taken from distance, of the starlings coming into land. Extremely beautiful they are too - magnificent in fact.
But my experience of the Starling Murmuration has almost always been the polar opposite. When we first came to Bristol ten years or so ago, we’d make an annual pilgrimage down to the Somerset Levels in January, to watch between 30-100,000 plus of these creatures incoming at dusk.
What particularly struck me about the whole phenomenon was the chaos, and the NOISE- I’d seen plenty of Murmurations from my time living near the piers in Brighton, but absolutely nothing on this scale. The sheer visceral thrill of these sleek, dark, beautiful creatures coming into land in front of you, behind you, and on many occasions literally right on top of you. I’d never felt anything quite like it either. Raining, sleeting, pelting down Starlings. A thing of genuine wonder.
So this project is about that: the sheer visceral thrill of being an on the spot eyewitness as 30,000 of these creatures come screaming in to land.
I’ve chucked the kitchen sink at this over the last few years. ICM, Multiple Exposures, Multiple Exposure ICM, straight shots, as well handheld long exposures.
This is the result. All shots Pentax cameras.
www.billwardphotography.co.uk
@billwardphotography
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