Xavi Bou

Xavi Bou is a Spanish photographer. He is mostly known for his project Ornitographies, that makes visible the beauty of bird flight paths. His work has been published in magazines like "National Geographic" and newspapers like "The Guardian".
Biography.
Xavi Bou born in Barcelona in 1979 and raised in Prat del Llobregat.
Bou's love for nature began from a very young age thanks to many walks with his grandfather to the wetlands of Delta del Llobregat. 
In 2003 he graduated in geology at the University of Barcelona and in photography at Grisart International Photography School. After 2003 he focused on the world of fashion and advertising, working as a lighting technician for several photographers.
In 2009 he founded LaCrin Studio together with a business partner, Daniel Ciprian. The studio specialized in photographic post-production that works for brands and magazines in Spain and abroad. Also for four years, he taught several courses in the areas of digital photography and post-production for the Grisart Photography School.
In 2012 he embarked on Ornitographies. Since then, this project became in his full-time dedication.
Ornitographies.
Bou's aim in creating this project is to show the hidden beauty of nature. He focuses on bird flights capturing the elusive contours drawn by birds in motion, or, as he says, "to make visible the invisible".
Bou says that he feels like a curator looking for hidden drawings that birds make in the sky with their flights.
Depending on the type of flight, the result could be regular patterns, like flamingoes in a V formation, or chaotic lines like swifts looking for insects in the air.
One of the favorite birds are clouds of starlings when they do their famous murmuration dance.
Especially when this group is behind attacked by hawks, as Bou says in an Atlas Obscura article: "I am passionate about the idea of how a sculptor, the hawk, shapes the shapes of starling clouds", he says.
With this project Bou created a multimedia project called Murmurations. Most of the images were made in Catalonia or in the area of the Iberian Peninsula. However, he also worked in Iceland and the United States.
Technique.
To show several seconds into a single image Bou uses the chronophotography technique. It is a technique created at the end of the 19th century, known through its main representatives: Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey and Ottomar Anschütz. This consists of taking many photographs in a row and then combining them all into a single one.
In the first stage of the study, in which Bou invested five years, he used his own camera. Subsequently, to perfect the technique and photographs, he used professional digital cinema cameras. These cameras allow him to take 25 to 120 frames in a second at a high-resolution.
Publications.
Since the first publication in 2012 the project has caught the attention of many media around the world; the most remarkable was the eight page article in the January 2018 issue of the "National Geographic" international edition. Also in newspapers like "The Guardian" UK, "Volkskrant" in the Netherlands, "Der Spiegel" in Germany, "De Morgen" in Belgium, and also digital media like CNN, Quartz, Vice, Atlas Obscura, Boooooom or DW Euromaxx among others.