Superb Starling Stunningly Stares at Me

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Camera: Nikon D300S
Exposure: 0.025 sec (1/40)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO Speed: 1000

This is a haunting photo. I left it up on my screen in full screen editing mode and left to get dinner. I came back into the room and the starling was staring at me, a very chilling moment.

The bird is a Superb Starling, taken in the same African Aviary as the last photo. This guy was just standing around doing whatever it is that starlings do when they aren’t currently eating. I was able to get extremely close to him. This photo is, unlike nearly everything else I will post, completely uncropped.

There are a few reasons why I think this photo is so haunting. First, it helps that the bird is directly staring at the lens with those intense eyes. It’s helpful that adult starlings have milky white eyes around black pupils. His beak points almost directly at the camera. You can’t avoid his eyes, but it’s more than just the bird that causes that.

Part of it is the layout of the photo. His eyes sit right at the upper right hand corner of thirds. That is, if you were to draw a line a third of the way down the image and another a third of the way across from the right, those lines would intersect right on his eye. The thirds are natural points of focus and the other three thirds corners sit on blurry areas, so you’re forced to look at those eyes.

The photo also has a very complementary vector analysis. The line through the bird’s body and out it’s tail moves in roughly the same direction as the line down the hand rail. The hand rail stops halfway down the tail, but the slightly out of focus terminates the line in a pleasing way that brings you back up the bird into the eyes.

More importantly than that, however, the top line of the hand rail runs directly into the eye, then hides neatly behind the bird just below his back. That line is quite important. Two of the lightest sections of the photo are in the bottom right hand corner. The half-moon of colored feathers on the starling’s breast and the near side of the railing merge together in a nice shiny way. Incidentally, the half-moon points right up at the eyes, a nice vector. That is to say, if you start at the bottom edge of the railing, your eyes will trace along it, across the half moon, and right up at the eyes. You can’t avoid them.