I’m not much of a wildlife photoer, if only because others are so very enthusiastic about it. Nature beautiful. (Hu)Man-made world ugly. Those are the cliches, and bollocks to them. I prefer to celebrate, with my photoing, the human-made world, often by noticing how “natural” (that is non-centrally-dictated) that human-made world so often is, especially in a complicated place like London.
But I do keep trying to photo non-human creatures in case I get lucky, and about once every other blue moon, I do get a non-human photo that strikes me as worth showing here.
So, for instance, earlier this year I was photoing Big Things with a seagull in front of them, mostly to illustrate how recognisable these Big Things are, despite being out of focus. Recognisable to me anyway. Thus:
On the left, a seagull lined up with the Spraycan. On the right, the same seagull lined up with the Millbank Tower. But then, when I lined the seagull up in front of Big Ben, I got this, which strikes me as, you know, quite good:
Click on that to get my original photo, with blurry Big Ben behind being clearly recognisable. But here is a case where the photo I photoed of the actual creature seemed more interesting than the Big Thing. Because this seagull happened to be pointing its face straight at me, I got a view of a seagull face that I for one don’t regularly see. The beak, because pointing straight at me, is taken out of the picture, and the head that remains looks more like that of some kind of fluffy baby seal or some such thing. But with bird legs. Scroll up so that you only see the head, and it hardly looks seagullish at all.
I was going to add a photo of a squirrel to this posting. I even checked that I was spelling squirrel right. But this squirrel photo, which I took about two minutes before taking the above seagull photos, although quite nice, had no architecture in the background. It was just a squirrel, in a tree.