Image Showcase: Little Cormorant in the woodlands

This is one of those images that really needs to be viewed on a larger display. It’s definitely more of a ‘landscape-with-a-bird-in-it’ type of picture than it being bird-centric, but I think it works for my overarching goal of showcasing Bharatpur’s most overlooked habitat – its dense woodland forests.

This stretch of the park is home to a vast variety of bird species, including waterfowl, thrushes, flycatchers, and forest raptors such as Honey Buzzards, Scops Owls, and Shikras. I have also always found the structure of the trees very appealing visually, so I wanted to create an image in which the landscape, rather than the bird, took centre stage.

On the evening I shot this image, I was on the lookout for potential wagtails and flycatchers that frequently perch on low branches above the water as they hunt for insects. As luck would have it, they were a complete no-show. This Little Cormorant, however, proved to be a worthy substitute. Fanning its wings in the golden light, it stood out surprisingly well against the dark background.

Getting close to the water’s edge, I zoomed out to 70mm on my lens and shot 5 vertical frames with the intention of stitching them in post-processing. While they’re not practical in every situation, especially when working with dynamic subjects such as fast-moving songbirds, panoramas can really pay off during those occasional moments where you need to show more context but getting physically closer to the subject or using a wider focal length just isn’t feasible.