Photographing Nature Beyond the Limits of Human Perception | Doris Mitsch | TED

A few years ago,

I suddenly had a lot of extra time to spend staring out the window.

Maybe you did a little bit of that, too,

in quarantine, at the start of the pandemic.

And while we were locked down,

I got kind of fascinated with what was still moving out there.

Like the local crows,

who went on with their normal commute

down the side of the mountain every morning.

And up again every evening at crow quitting time.

(Laughter)

Birds of prey came out every day and made their rounds.

I'm using a process here called photo stacking,

where you take multiple pictures from a fixed point over time

and layer them into one composite photograph.

Photo stacking is a way to show the trails of things like stars,

fireflies, athletes, airplanes,

pretty much anything that moves.

It's a way to make the shape of those movements visible.

Most of these have between 500 and 2,000 layers.

They take a long time to build,

and a lot of that time is spent just experimenting with which layers to keep in

and which to leave out of the final image.

Here, a group of pelicans came in from one side

and noticed something intriguing in the water.

Then another group came in from the other side

and circled around to check it out.

So this isn't one moment frozen in time like a traditional photograph,

but something more like a story told in two dimensions

with layers of the fourth dimension.

Kind of.

Looking at flight trails this way,

you really notice some of the rhyming patterns that repeat everywhere in nature,

like waves of sound or water

or spiraling galaxies,

whirlpools and storms.

And sometimes they seem to sort of sketch out other things

that are usually invisible to us.

Like the thermal updrafts that hawks and vultures ride on,

finding even the smallest patches of turbulence in the air to carry them.

While I was working on these,

I learned that some vultures are so good at this

that they can soar that way without flapping their wings at all

for hours.

Which has to be the most meditative way there is to look for carrion.

(Laughter)

And this is what it looks like to navigate by shouting.

Bats are characterized as either whisperers or shouters,

and we're lucky that the range of our hearing ends

right about where their voices begin

because the shouts can get up to 140 decibels,

as loud as a jet engine.

What we call silence is just the limit of our hearing.

I love to think about that,

and about how most other creatures,

from European moles to rainbow trout,

find their way by wavelengths of light or sound

or fields of electricity or magnetism that our senses just aren't set up for.

And that those are just the ways that we know about.

In the 1930s,

the British ornithologist Edmund Selous studied flocks of starlings,

moving together as if they had one mind

and wrote a book on his conclusion that the birds must be psychic.

And, you know, there's still no evidence that they're not.

But we now know that they follow each other

with a split-second lag time

that's just too short for our human sense of time.

And maybe for some predators,

like the peregrine falcon in the middle there.

So these are pictures of group decisions

made at a speed that makes them invisible to us.

Pictures of the hidden intelligence in what might look at first random

or even chaotic.

Reminders that the universe isn’t built to our measure

but operates on systems beyond our perception.

That what we call empty air is anything but empty.

If you're a bat,

it holds the sound of the shape of a hillside.

It's also a map of magnetic signals and electrical fields.

And a topography of the smells of krill patches and plankton blooms.

We humans have invented whole digital worlds,

but sometimes we still need to be reminded

that there’s more in this heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.

And that there are endless ways to look at familiar sights,

like a bird in flight, with fresh eyes.

To expand our shared experience in a way that connects us

with the rest of the living world.

To feel both kinship with our fellow creatures

and respect and even reverence for their otherness.

In the words of the poet and naturalist Jarod K. Anderson,

bats can hear shapes,

plants can eat light,

bees can dance maps.

We can hold all these ideas at once

and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all.

Thank you.

(Applause)