Pixiq

This post relates to my last – Blur for Creative Effect – but this time a heat haze produced a creative shot.

However hard I work on an overseas trip – and do I work hard – it is rare to achieve more than   3-4 what I call 'jewels in the crown' shots, which are the crème de la crème of the 'keepers'. These are the ones, amongst the captured images evoke, which leap out of the screen. They invariably end up as best sellers.

There are many factors that gel together to produce a jewel shot. Certainly, being in the right place at the right time is a prime one. Then the process of seeing, composing and taking must be interwoven as an instinctive fluid process to gain the advantage of ephemeral magical moments. Get any of these processes wrong and the shot becomes relegated to a 'keeper', or worse still, deleted.

The irony about this shot is that I almost missed taking it in Kenya's Masai Mara. For days I avoided the dry grassland area being burnt to stimulate new green shoots to lure game back into that part of the reserve. Late one afternoon, we paused on the crest of a hill for my driver to search for cheetah and saw flames fast approaching one side of our dirt track below. Our initial instinct was to retrace our tracks, until I noticed black and white objects moving purposefully in front of a flickering orange line. Using binoculars, I could see they were white storks, which had migrated south after breeding in Europe.

Later I discovered these storks are drawn towards fire, where they gorge themselves on waves of locusts and crickets escaping from a flaming death towards their fiery bills.

As we moved in closer, I saw how I could use the heat haze to advantage to abstract the scene in a way that was reminiscent of an Impressionist painting. Composition was difficult, since both the fire line and the storks were constantly moving. At the time, the snaking fire line suggested a landscape format, but after I saw the frames on a lightbox, I selected one to crop both sides and used the center of the frame to make a vertical shot, which appears here. This helped to enhance the painterly feel.