This project was a spontaneous concept study intended to document the rhythm and pace of unknown creatures. In this case, the subject was the American White Ibis (Eudocimus albus), a wading bird that I encountered for the first time ever on a recent trip to Orlando, Florida. Above all, this study recorded the process of learning about something curious in the world without first referring to any written information.

Since I had never seen this kind of creature before my one-week trip, the project turned out to be a challenging exercise. For a non-ornithological photographer, choosing the right images to express the language of emotions in these strange creatures within a short period of time posed a number of quandaries. Should I focus on identifying familiar patterns in their movement found in other birds, I thought, or emphasize the subtleties of their nameless, indescribable emotions? For the digital gallery presentation, I deliberately juxtaposed each panel of images chosen from different time frames as though they were photographed at that precise moment. The format of the project was meant to look like a series of triptychs. Each triptych had a caption to specify when the first image in the panel was captured along with an exact time, down to the second. What I wanted to explore is a process of decision-making that was framed to distill the essence of more than five hundred frames taken during my patiently awaited moments of expression.

In our busy daily lives, unnecessary repetitions of events, time conflicts and overlapping between approaches are filtered out in the editorial routines of our brains, whether intentionally or by accident. This causes a lot of trouble, but at the same time, it creates many pleasant surprises. It also involves a process of reflecting on how we remember things in the real world.