Flight patterns

Spanish photographer Xavi Bou (previously) tracks and records the flight patterns of birds, combining their repetitive movements into elongated shapes that twist through the sky for his series Ornitographies. The images are inspired by chronophotography, a Victorian era photography method that combined multiple images to create movement, and edited digitally in Photoshop. The layered images appear like floating double helixes or fringed ribbon depending on the size and wingspan of each bird…

There they are, up on the power line, side by side by side by side by side. Starlings, each one like the other — rubber-stamped birds, a mob (or murmuration) of indecipherably similar critters, always the same, sitting or flying. But wait! What if there's such a thing as an Exceptional Starling? I think I've found one (or maybe ... four!), hiding in a video.

Interested in how the human eye perceives birds in flight, Spanish photographer Xavi Bou sought to examine this motion in a way that avoided the blur that comes with creating an image with a long exposure. To do this, he turned to chronophotography, an 150-year-old technique that combines many photographs taken in succession to imitate movement. Unlike this pre-cinema strategy however, Bou uses the power of Photoshop to bring all of his images together into one, making each bird appear like…

Xavi Bou shoots image-bursts of birds and then compiles them in Photoshop to form the working project called "Ornitographies." It almost looks like frequencies moving across the photograph, and there’s a visible rhythm that is not so obvious when comparing it to what we know as an image of a bird flying. It tells a story, capturing an event in totality. These images show how

….”Space” is more complex and dynamic than previous formal models allowed. Ideas about spatiality are moving away from physical objects and forms towards the variety of territori…

One of the best ways to identify a bird is by the way it flies, especially at a distance when details about its coloration and other field marks are...

This Catalan photographer makes the invisible visible

Spanish photographer Xavi Bou (previously) tracks and records the flight patterns of birds, combining their repetitive movements into elongated shapes that twist through the sky for his series Ornitographies. The images are inspired by chronophotography, a Victorian era photography method that combined multiple images to create movement, and edited digitally in Photoshop. The layered images appear like floating double helixes or fringed ribbon depending on the size and wingspan of each bird…

Apus apus

Spanish photographer Xavi Bou captures birds' flight patterns in these gorgeous images.