Blog
June 20, 2026
This image might be one of my personal favourites, for obvious reasons. I’ve always adored photographs of birds huddled together, but until this encounter, it wasn’t something I had ever witnessed for myself.
It was my mom who first spotted this group of Indian Silverbills perched on a dead tree on a particularly cold winter morning. The branches were wonderfully gnarly, but finding a clean composition without stray twigs cutting through the frame was incredibly challenging. From my initial position, the angle was quite steep and the background was nothing more than a flat, unappealing wash of pale blue.
As I inched closer, I raised my rig overhead with my arms fully outstretched, hoping to bring a line of sunlit trees into the background. Everything seemed to align just as I’d hoped they would. I snapped a series of images, completely unaware of the yawning Silverbill on the left.
It was only later, while reviewing the set on my computer, that I noticed it. A very welcome surprise, to say the least.