In 1860 Charles Darwin wrote, “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” The plumes have been so extravagant, he surmised, they could possibly be a hindrance to survival. Darwin’s frustration with their seemingly inexplicable magnificence finally led him to the thought of sexual choice. Although this type of pure choice—pushed by the desire of 1 intercourse for sure traits in people of the opposite intercourse—is effectively understood immediately, a peacock’s feather can nonetheless maintain thriller for its viewers, says Heidi Koch. She and her husband, Hans-Jürgen, have spent the previous few years photographing feathers in all their wonderful element.
The German couple has educated their lenses on the pure world for greater than three many years, however they don’t think about themselves nature photographers. They decide as an alternative for a broader label: life-form photographers. In 2020, after a number of years capturing photographs of all the things from lab mice to bumblebees, the Kochs turned their consideration to plumage.
(See these chickens go from coop to catwalk.)
“The beauty and diversity of feathers is so extreme,” says Heidi. That’s why the pair started photographing essentially the most mesmerizing examples from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin and different personal collections in Germany. They used a course of, known as focus stacking, wherein comparable images with totally different focal planes are blended to realize a extra profound depth of subject.
Their mission, named Feathers—Poetic Masterpiece of Evolution, is an ode to the attract of birds and to evolution itself. Completing it required delving into evolutionary biology, they usually generally discovered themselves pondering nature as Darwin did greater than 150 years in the past. “By the end,” Heidi says, “we really could understand the man.”
This story seems within the November 2023 challenge of National Geographic journal.
