I was extremely lucky to spend a few nights on Tiritiri Matangi Island Sanctuary recently. I’ll write a full blog about that soon, but today I wanted to share something a little different.

I’ve been on a kick of trying new things. Double exposures, odd compositions, panning, anything to get me out of the same old, same old. While I was on Tiri, I was despairing over getting photographs of Kokako. They’re forest birds and spend a lot of time in dense branches, foraging for fruit and flowers. It makes them difficult to photograph, because there are usually sticks in the way, and the background is busy!

Usually, my photography is very straightforward. It’s natural history photography, so my photos are photojournalistic. This time, I wanted to try for something softer, more ethereal, much like the song of the Kokako (If you haven’t heard one, hop on over to the New Zealand Birds Online page, which has some recordings!).

So once I had a reasonably good perch and a reasonably good pose, I took a double exposure – one in focus, one defocused to catch the blurry bokeh of light and shade that patterns the forest.

The blending of the images was done in the digital darkroom – I had seconds with the bird in this pose and didn’t have time to scroll through the menus to the camera’s multiple-exposure function. It is something I will try in future though (with more planning!), because it will yield quite different effects.

This particular Kokako is called Bandit. Each bird has a specific band combination, read down the left leg and then the right leg. Bandits combination is JM-G, J for the pale green ‘Jade’, M for the metal band, and G for green (here’s more about the Kokako on Tiri and their leg band patterns). While he was foraging with and calling to a partner, I unfortunately didn’t manage to see their band combination.

Let me know what you think! It’s quite different from my normal work, but I do quite like it.