Black & white Seascapes – Yury Bird

I was born near the sea in a small port town Skadovsk in Ukraine and I spent a lot of time on the seashore – piers in the sunset light, boats, and the silence. Since my very childhood, I still remember the sunset sky and the dawns over the horizon. Many years later, having moved to Dnepropetrovsk city, I came back to my homeland, traveled around Southeast Asia, and my recollections and new perception visualized through the lens of my camera. I can call myself a self-reliant seascape photographer; most of my works are dedicated to the sea.

I feel I am lost for words to describe the photo of mine as it is not wordy and some people find it minimalistic. Silence, horizon, loneliness. I want to tell much with few words. To tell about the state of the space abandoned by humans but influenced by them. I do not want to bother spectators viewing my photos with excessive signs. A modern spectator is already overwhelmed with information and he cannot escape from this flow. On the other hand, my photo has absolutely no deep sense and does not require any words to describe it. A common snap made on the subconscious level. A part of concrete beam of a pier poking out of water or a ghost of a boat at long exposure near the horizon. What words could describe it? It is probably better to look at it without any words and that would be enough. And everyone will most probably find his own words.

I have tried to find new approaches for the photos based on my own perception of the environment. This concerns both the shooting technique and some other new styles. Genre shooting, portraiture, landscapes, film and digital photography. And every time I returned to the same manner of depiction, same look and technique. I came back to digital and long exposure photography. It allows my photos to look mysterious with a philosophical underlying idea. The atmospheric tone of the photo, the motion outside the time draws one’s attention to the static (dynamic) object in the face of the dynamic (static) foreground (background), or on the contrary, freezes the object in the infinite stream of the time. This nuance or minute is very hard to capture.

This requires not only the knowledge of the long exposure photography technique, but also a certain luminous flux, lighting, or a shadow image. This is what I like such shooting technique for. It is a hard work. One can fail to get the required result. You do not depend on the camera, but on the state of objects and the nature.

As a seascape photographer and a traveler, I wish to visit Iceland. This place attracts me most and I feel anxious about the mysterious planetary landscapes and fantastic terrain reliefs. Despite the fact that many photographers have visited Iceland, I believe I would succeed to find a place worth taking my own photos. Salty dried-up lakes, empty spaces, horizons and unusual reliefs of the seashore rocks, and water spaces attract me.

The modern fine arts are so much contradictory that I usually ignore them and they do not impress me either. I like photos by Alexey Titarenko, Michael Kenna, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Masahisa Fukase, canvasses by Mark Rothko, and normally that is enough for me. As for cinema, I am deeply impressed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The same subject of space abandoned by humans and existing all alone, but hominized, is very close to my creation. And music is my best inspiration. Besides classical music, I prefer Ambient and Doom Music. At first sight, this music is very different from my photography, but it completes the photos, indeed. It is hard to explain, it is more of subjective perception. The music is like the mood of nature – changes rapidly from a flat calm sea to a sixth grade storm.

I tend to prefer black-and-white photography and usually crop photos to a square. I use Nikon cameras and lenses, branded ND filters and gradients. Why black-and-white photo? Because it is creative photography, first of all. Such photography allows to focus on shapes and interrelations of elements and objects of the image and not to be distracted by the color. The black-and-white photography combines the light and the shadow, thus describing three-dimensionality of the photographed subject or scene and telling us its story in the frame. As a rule, color dilutes and breaks down the frame, which then loses its integrity and takes a spectator’s attention away from the main scene with its plenty of colors. However, despite this, I do not abandon the color totally and enjoy making experiments with it. [Official Website]