While Bobo explored the kitchen table this afternoon, I set up my tripod, set a reflector on a kitchen chair behind my camera bag, and placed one of my OTT lights on the table. None of these things deterred Bobo and with each addition, she got more curious. She spent most of her time looking down into my camera bag but she was also curious about the silver reflector and she beaked the base of the OTT light. When I shoved the camera lens just a few inches away, she wasn’t deterred nor did she act afraid as she usually does with anything she doesn’t know intimately. As I played with the shots I took, I realized that most were not in great focus because, despite the use of the tripod, Bobo was in almost constant motion and while the background was in crisp focus, my subject wasn’t.
The closeup of her incredibly ugly Zygodactyl feet (that means two toes facing front and two toes facing back) was in focus because she stood still long enough. As I examined this shot, I couldn’t help but think that the only thing uglier than her feet is a tomato horn worm, a creature to which Bobo’s feet bear a very strong resemblance. Then I got to thinking about the other parts of her that are pretty ugly as well. While Bobo’s feathers are vibrantly colored and beautiful many parts of her are rather odd. Her beak is constantly flaking off and it is chipped and ragged. It is attached suspiciously at the underside possibly with skin but there is a crater at the bottom, I suspect to allow her beak to open wide. And the white, featherless skin around her eyes is wrinkly and just plain weird looking. It is incredibly soft, however, despite its appearance. When Bobo is in the mood to allow me the privilege of scratching her head, she lets me rub her eyelids too, and that area is the smoothest skin I’ve ever felt.
My intention was to create a collage of several of the shots I took today, showing Bobo’s various weird parts. But as I created the collage, I couldn’t get an arrangement that showed what I wanted to feature. That is until I placed the foot shot. For some reason it became huge and I realized that placing the eye and the beak made the creation very Picasso-esque. Out with the extra shots. Just these three make a Picasso Bobo.
