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The Bird on the Beach
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Behind the scenes
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The Bird on the Beach

Homer, Alaska - 2021
Homer, Alaska

I prefer to work with big alpha animals – elephants have a greater pull on me than mice. This is true also with birds and this has drawn me towards the American Bald eagle – a magnificent and emblematic creature with an astonishing wingspan of up to seven feet.

The difficulty is capturing imagery that captures fresh detail – the world is not short of images of this bird – indeed they adorn homes in America from the White House down.

The starting point for me was always going to be the wings – their size and textural detail. However, the more I worked on this project in Alaska, the more I was disappointed by my “in flight” work – I struggled to do the wings justice. The problem was simply that in flight, the wings do look big, but there is a disconnect to anything that gives real scale – a “big sky” does not help as it excludes much of what could help define and give context.

I travelled to the fishing village of Homer – a great place to spot great Bald eagles, especially in the winter and spring and sure enough there were a great number of eagles on the beach. It was then a question of getting sufficiently close to work with as small a telephoto as possible.

Behind the scenes

The difficulty is capturing imagery that captures fresh detail – the world is not short of images of this bird.

David Yarrow
Print sizes

Standard

37” x 56” Unframed

52” x 71” Framed

Edition of 12

Large

56” x 84” Unframed

71” x 99” Framed

Edition of 12

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