(Roughly) Daily

From artist and photographer Doris Mitsch…

In Locked Down Looking Up, Bay Area photographer Doris Mitsch captures the swirling, shapeshifting flight patterns of birds and other winged creatures: a flock of vultures creates coils and whirls between rugged mesas, crows descend toward a forest in single-file trails, and gulls congregate above the sea in lengthy lines.

The ongoing project began early in 2020 when Mitsch set up a camera outside her front door and shot consecutive images of birds flying around her home. “While everything in my life has come to a standstill, up in the air, there is still a lot going on,” she writes. She’s since traveled along the California coast and to Moab’s desert landscapes capturing similar swarming phenomena featuring vultures, gulls, and crows…

See more of at “Photographic Composites Document the Mesmerizing Flight Trails of Vultures, Crows, and Bats,” in @Colossal and at Doris’ site.

• “Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.” – John Muir

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As we ponder patterns, we might send faithfully-captured birthday greetings to Thomas Wedgwood; he was born on this date in 1771. An English inventor, he was the first person reliably documented to have used light-sensitive chemicals to capture silhouette images on durable media such as paper, and the first known to have attempted to photograph the image formed in a camera obscura. His practical experiments yielded only shadow image photograms that were not light-fast, but his conceptual breakthrough and partial success have led some historians to call him “the first photographer.”

Wedgwood was the son of Josiah Wedgwood, and so the uncle of Charles Darwin (the son of Thomas’ sister, Susannah), and he was a friend and patron of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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