Getting All In A Flap

By Socar Myles

Fun With Motion Photography

I'd like you to picture something in your head, just for a moment. There's this room, about the size of a prison cell--let's say four feet by seven. (It could be five by eight, or three-and-a-half by nine, but the precise dimensions aren't important. It's a small room, is the thing to remember. A bog without the dunny. A closet without the shoes.) The walls are yellow, with the odd beigey streak, as if someone started painting and lost interest halfway through. At one end, there's a stack of boxes with a camera on top. At the other, there's a fan, two desklamps, and a folding chair. Some bare-footed fool's standing on the chair, toes curled over the edge. That's me. You can tell I'm a fool by my outfit: I'm in shirt-tails and nightgown, with a dry-cleaning bag on my head. There's a sheet draped over my shoulders, and a toilet-paper bulge on my chest. Worst of all, I've got a cardboard beak taped to my spectacles. The fan's blowing, the lights are blazing, and I'm in the middle of it all, merrily flapping my arms. I'm drenched in sweat, and panting like a dog. It sounds something like this:

Hooooooosh-whappa-whappa!

Hoooooooosh, whappa-haa!

Whappa-hooooooosh, whappa-haa, whappa-YEEK! kraka-BOOM!

runch-runch...ouch.

That last bit, that's me going arse-over-teakettle, taking the whole ridiculous setup with me. My legs are all snarled up with the chair's legs, and my beak's poking me in the thigh. My nightgown is up round my shoulders somewhere. Or at least, that's what it feels like. I can't see a thing, what with the sheet over my head, and all. The camera's happily snapping away, taking one shot per minute of the wall. At this precise moment, I look a lot like a pile of dirty laundry--but that's not the point. See, just before the fall, I looked like the photo to your right.

It all started a day or two previously, with me jumping on my bed. Mother would've had a fit, had she seen. She was the one who got me that bed, back when I first moved to Canada. She said it had special springs, all in separate pouches. It would, she informed me, do wonders for my back. I slept in it for about a week, and then the couch I'd ordered from IKEA arrived. I like to sleep sitting up, so the bed was put aside for guests. The bedroom was pressed into service as a storeroom, and that's why I was in there that day. I'd gone in to get seed for the budgies, and there was the bed, all pristine and tempting, bathed in warmth from the morning sun. I plopped down on the corner, and immediately bounced back off, propelled by those individually-packaged springs. Feeling playful, I did it again, and then again. My slippers flew off, one after the other. Drawing up my feet, I tried an experimental hop, and found it fun. Soon, I was bounding about like a kid on a trampoline. Such a joyful moment, I thought, deserved to be captured for posterity. I got the camera and the stack of boxes, and snapped my misbehaving self.

That got me thinking. I rather liked the sense of motion, right there, not to mention the sense of fun. That's me in a nutshell, see. Nothing's ever completely serious with me, least of all art. I love a pretty picture, and a dramatic one's even better, but if there's a spot of absurdity in there as well, I can't look away. Carefully-composed family portraits where everyone's forking their fingers behind somebody else's head, soaring skylines framing seagull bombing raids, bleakly rotting root tangles with frogs peering through them--those are the images I'll remember. I looked at my dangling feet and mussed-up bed, and felt an idea begin to take shape. Something with flight, something with motion: something with birds.

I have a funny relationship with birds. It's a bit of an up-and-down affair, always has been. Most of the time, we get along just fine. I watch the birds; the birds squawk at me. They get an audience (and the odd tasty treat), and I take their names for my birding log. It's a mutually satisfying arrangement. The problems crop up when the birds decide they know what's best for me. Getting up at four-thirty in the morning, for instance--we've never quite seen eye to eye on that. Birds love a sunrise fish breakfast, but I like my kippers at nine, to go with the morning news. They think my walls need a whitewash; I think they're better in beige. They feel duty-bound to put the vogel back into Der Vogelfänger bin ich, ja; I think they're horrid wee squealymouthed rotters. See? Up and down.

We've had some great moments, like the time I saw a black swift gliding over the Pacific Press building, and some downright embarrassing ones, like the time that marauding cassowary bit me on the bum. We're too much alike--that's the problem. We have our moments (you know, when we're all fire and grace, soaring across a burning sky), but then you see us skittering down the street on our spindly legs, and you can't imagine anything more clumsy. We're acrobats one minute, and garbage-pickers the next. Behold the portly garbage-goose, prospecting in the bin! Let's kick him in his broad caboose, so he goes tumbling in!

At any rate, birds seemed the perfect subject for mildly ridiculous motion photography. They're graceful in the air, and dumpy on the ground. They've got beauty and buffoonery built right in: the swan and the gull are both birds, after all. One glides by on the river, providing window-dressing for a perfect afternoon; the other shits on your head, ruining everything.

I've never had much luck shooting actual birds--getting close enough for a decent picture without a zoom lens is quite the tall order--but not having something on hand should never be an obstacle, when it comes to taking its picture. The idea of something is often as good as the real thing. Sometimes, it's even better: you can get all the drama of a bird whirring its wings for takeoff, but without getting a single feather up your nose. With that in mind, I made a little list:

IMPORTANT THINGS ABOUT BIRDS

- They have long, bony legs

- They have short, round bodies, (compared to human beings, anyway)

- Beaks & wings

- They hold onto things with their toes, and often stand on one foot

- They like to puff out the feathers on their chests

- A bird's "expression" is determined by the position of its head. Artists draw them with their beaks pointing down to represent sadness, or with their necks stretched out for aggression.

Long bony legs--well, that was easy enough. I bunched up my trousers round my thighs, and there they were: the family knees, in all their knobbly glory. They come from Mother's side, those knees. My sister and I both have them. We're like a pair of storks, come swimsuit season, with our towels round our shoulders, and our long skinny legs underneath.

The short, round body, that presented more of a challenge. My body is neither short nor round. "Long and pointy" is more like it. I stood in front of the mirror and bent over at the waist. That helped with the "short" bit, but my big bony bottom stuck out to the side. I tucked it behind me, but then I couldn't stand on one foot any more, not without losing my balance. No--I would just have to make sure and flap the sheet over it. Maybe I could even waggle it a little, so it would look like a tail. Add a few hankies down the bra, and I'd look positively rotund. (Shame? Me? Certainly not! If looking pretty--or even human--would mess up the shot, then, hey, pass the ugly stick!)

For the beak and wings, I had to improvise. I didn't quite get it on the first try: my coat didn't have enough flap, and my beak was attached on a slant.

I missed out on the whole "expression" bit, too. It was, I felt, one of those "Woo! Camera! Hi!" shots. You know the ones: the subject's staring into the lens with their mug somewhere between confusion and constipation, and their hands in an awkward position. You get a lot of these in family albums. I must've taken (and been in) about a thousand, myself. Still, it wasn't a bad start. The picture said "bird." "Camera-conscious bird," it's true, but "bird" nonetheless. On subsequent flights, I was careful to look away from the lens.

Even so, it took me twenty frames to get that one right: ten where I'd forgotten my beak, five where my head was all blurry, two legs-in-the-air mishaps, and three decent shots. Two of those, I rejected for less-than-optimal foot positioning. With the pose in the bag, all that remained was the Photoshopping. In addition to blotchy walls, that little room of mine has a number of noticeable flaws: namely, two socket panels and a fusebox, all of which were intruding on the picture. Those had to go, as did the junction of wall and ceiling. I thought about taking out the chair, maybe replacing it with a perch of some sort, but I decided I liked it where it was. It helped underscore the essential silliness of somebody pretending to be a bird. You could almost forget it was just some goofy bird impression, without the folding chair. I wouldn't want anyone forgetting that.

The most physically demanding shot I took involved bending almost double at the waist, beak practically grazing my knee, and flapping my arms behind my back. It wasn't that it was difficult getting into position. I've never had trouble folding myself up in funny ways. Staying on the chair, on the other hand, that was a whole different story. If I leaned too far forward, the chair bucked its back legs up, spilling me on my head. If I leaned too far back, it went down the other way. When I started to flap, it shook so badly I thought it might fall apart. As if that wasn't bad enough, my feet were all sweaty, so I was constantly on the verge of sliding off. And then--oh, yes, there's more--and then, my stupid robe wouldn't flap. It kept tangling up with my arms, or getting over my head and ripping my beak off my face. When it finally did behave, the material was too light, and it whooshed out of the shot, leaving the faintest of grey smudges in its wake. I had to increase the exposure time and flap in slow motion, all the while holding my head and knees steady. Twice, my robe plucked my hairpin out, spilling hair over everything. It took almost fifty frames to get everything in place at the same time. There's a Mastercard commercial in there somewhere, I'm sure. (Bad Mastercard joke: priceless!)

In the end, I had to summon the birdcatcher to round up all these flappers. Of all the pictures in the series, "Packbawky Catcher" was the most altered from the original shot. I used a shower-curtain for the translucent-winged effect, and the result was extremely bright. There were shiny reflections everywhere, including a whopper of a glare on my specs, and almost no deep shadows at all. While I rather liked the subtle gradations of light I'd managed to capture, they weren't exactly in keeping with the ominous roosting birdcatcher motif. I used a Channel Mixer (monochrome) layer set to Multiply to add the deepest shadows, then painted colours and highlights back in by hand, using Soft Light and Colour layers, and my trusty Wacom pen. A lot of obtrusive noise crept in during the process, so I used partial blur layers and texture overlays to get it out.

I learned an interesting thing about cameras, while taking my bird pictures: if you set the exposure long enough, and move something fast enough, you can make it vanish almost entirely. This is brilliant for making people appear to melt into walls, for example, or pretending you haven't got any feet. (I discovered this phenomenon in a rather disturbing way: I was headless in several frames!)

I reckon I'll be experimenting with motion photography for a long time to come. I've had more fun with this series, I think, than with any of my previous ones. There's a great deal of potential for fun and trickery here. I've already photographed myself being sucked into a television set, using a similar technique. If I had two people, I could shoot them disappearing into one another. Cameras never lie, indeed! Cameras always lie. Had I known that, I'd have bought one ages ago. Visual fiction with a built-in expectation of being read as reality: now, there's something worth having.