“My photos are a photoshop-free zone,” the 45-year-old photographer told The Epoch Times.
Spencer, an Australian-born professional artist, filmmaker, and photographer, currently lives in Brazil. He uses a semi-professional camera and does not deploy any post-processing techniques.
His award-winning work, “Birds: Poetry in the Sky,” has recently been published as a coffee-table book and has been garnering an extraordinary response. In addition to receiving emails daily from around the world, Spencer has had numerous poems, blessings, and letters from people thanking him for inspiring them to draw, paint, and create music.
“Every day, people who are touched and get emotional from the images write to me,” he said.
And it’s not hard to see why.
The photos of hummingbirds’ wings illuminated by the sun to create a prism effect is just one part of a thrilling collection on the same theme. “Birds: Poetry in the Sky” contains Spencer’s entire “Winged Prism” series, plus many more stunning photos from Australia.
The key to his success as an artist, Spencer says, is an ability to “think outside the box, have a cosmic vision, and bring it down to earth.”
“This is difficult to do and requires years of observation and patience to capture truly unique images,“ he said. ”I am always looking for different angles and light to photograph things.”
Spencer has attempted to recreate the hummingbird scene many times, but he has never been able to recapture the exact same “poetic harmony” of many of this and other photos. “They are unique moments that are gone forever,” he said. “Such images depend on very specific atmospheric conditions, and the alignment of the sun in between palm trees.”
Blessed with creative talent, Spencer has, in fact, only been dabbling in photography since 2014. Prior to that, he was a professional painter for 25 years, before going on to filmmaking—scooping 19 international awards for his three films.
It was while making “The Dance of Time” in 2011 that Spencer filmed the natural phenomenon of the hummingbirds’ wings being illuminated under the sun. So when he later managed to frame and snap the same effect with a photographic camera, his eye was already well-trained. The result was the award-winning series “Winged Prism.”
“Most of the photos in the series were taken in 2014 and then in 2018,” he said.
His greatest reward, however, is the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of his labor grouped together and published in his book, which he says “resembles more a piece of art than just a book.”
“The sequence of the book is very beautiful,” he said, “and flows like a poem written in the sky. It has my texts and poems that open each chapter.”
Aside from “Birds: Poetry in the Sky,” Spencer doesn’t overly focus on self-promotion, since “the work appears to promote itself with people all over the world constantly reposting throughout social media.
“I get many messages from people who have lost loved ones, and when they come into contact with the images, remember them with fondness,” he said.
