Birds: Poetry in the Sky

There is no shortage of books filled with close, sharp, gorgeous photographs of birds. I love seeing such photos and revel in the brilliant colors and tack-sharp details. But photographer Christian Spencer knows that this isn’t the only way to take beautiful, compelling pictures of birds. His book, Birds: Poetry in the Sky, is filled with bird photography that is rather unconventional, but also unforgettable.

Birds: Poetry in the Sky is a large-format, coffee-table-type art book. The pictures are divided into five categories: hummingbird rainbows, hummingbird portraits, birds in flight, birds and water, and birds and trees. You may be wondering what “hummingbird rainbows” might be. There’s a reason those are the first photos in this collection.

Spencer was filming some hummingbirds for a documentary when he noticed occasional flashes of rainbows in the viewfinder. When he later slowed down the footage, he discovered that in very specific conditions sunlight passing through the hummingbird’s feathers created a prism effect. He later attempted to capture the same phenomenon with his photographic camera. After much experimenting over several years, he produced a series of photographs that are unlike any I’ve ever seen.

An example of one of these hummingbird rainbows graces this book’s cover, and you can see another sample below. The birds are backlit, so you don’t get any color – except for a beautiful prismatic effect of the light filtering through the bird’s wing and tail feathers. It’s gorgeous, and proof that, as Spencer says, “there is always a different and revealing way to capture the beauty of nature.”

Even though these hummingbird rainbows only make up about 20% of the book, they are far from the only unwordly photos here. Some of the shots, particularly a couple of Little Corella flocks in flight, look fake. But in a good way – the scores of slightly indistinct white birds filling the frame in front of the wooded background…it’s arresting.

The rest of the photos, while more conventional, are all enchanting in some way, whether it be a moody atmosphere or simply a showy, colorful bird in a pretty setting. There are plenty of the latter, and you won’t find many better than the Green-headed Tanager on page 206.

Thankfully, the book’s physical size and quality reinforce the amazing photographs it contains. The book is quite large, dwarfing the Sibley Guide, as you can see from the comparison photos here, and the layout makes use of all that real estate. There is a good bit of empty white space, but it’s not problematic here as it allows the pictures to space to breathe and be appreciated. As much as I would have loved more photographic content here, trying to cram in more would have been detrimental. The matte, textured paper perfectly shows off the photos.

The back contains some notes on 12 of the pictures, providing context on location, photographic techniques, and some natural history. I really wish this would have been done for all the photos or, at the very least, that location and date was provided for every shot.

Other than that, the only slightly negative thing I can say about the book is that relatively few species are illustrated. The 140 photographs depict a total of 48 species. To be fair, for the rainbow photos it doesn’t really matter what species it is, as you cannot identify the birds anyway. As for the rest, I greedily want more to be captured by Spencer’s lens.

Recommendation

Wow. I’ve never seen a more beautiful, unique, and artistic collection of bird photography than Birds: Poetry in the Sky. It’s not cheap, but the quality is top-notch and is easily worth it for fans of either birds or great photography.