Painting with a camera

These photographs are almost contrary to the images most people try to obtain of birds: sharp, in focus, fairly big in the frame, good colour and lighting (and possibly more exciting subjects!). For a change I thought about disregarding most of these guidelines or ideals to create almost painterly-like images based more on imagination and less on an ideal perception of how a bird photograph should look. The images below were all made using the camera controls and hand-held techniques (with exposures as slow as 1/13) at the time of shooting. The only post-processing involved conversion to black and white and slight changes in clarity of the RAW file.