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As is their wont, pigeons go a-courting when the time is
right, and any time but the depth of winter seems to be just fine. The
red eye of the this male reflects, to the poet's eye, the red river of life
that runs beneath the visible world.
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In the midst
of photographing pigeons, I looked into the distance and saw this fellow
contemplating nothingness. He continued this contemplation while I
reset the zoom to reach out to him. When I was young, nothingness had
quite a vogue, but has suffered a decline since. I suppose even dour
philosophers ran out of things to say about it. Still, there is a bit
of it lurking about here and there, ready to take the limelight again when
moods change.
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Back to
the pigeons. These fellows have us beat for acuity of vision, and
they have, at will, the best seats in the house. Their ornate promontory
has a beauty that delights the eye, and is preserved from past times when
pleasure in architectural detail was a consciously aimed-for effect.
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This shot
was excised from the preliminary set of pictures, but I regretted losing
it too much, so it went back in the ones to show. The colors seem
especially pleasing, the foreground is in bluish shadow against a background
of sunny golden water surface. Perhaps it is a good thing, or a at
least a self-protective thing, that we can ignore the surfeit of manufactured
homeliness of our surroundings, but when beauty occurs, and we ignore
that, then we impoverish ourselves.
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Having just
a moment to take this shot, and no time to set the exposure, the image
needed some effort to restore it to a decent viewability. The automatic
exposure function of the camera "guessed" wrong about the brightness and
seriously overexposed the two figures. After working with the image
with several different techniques, it is finally approaching the vision
that I saw originally.
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The geese
have successfully raised their young and will probably soon leave the park
for distant grazing grounds. They are big, impressive birds, and
it has been a real pleasure to watch their careful parenting and the rapid
growth of the goslings into young adulthood. Happy cloud trails to
them.
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This was
a rarity -- I had never seen the geese wander this far from the water. They
seem not so sure about railroad tracks. What does this strange pattern
of wood and ribbons of hard shiny substance mean? Nature teaches the
value of dubiety, and I concur, doubt can indeed be a good friend.
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This is
a first for the images of this web site. Programs that manipulate
images have, in their bags of tricks, functions that alter the image in
ways that supposedly reflect imagination. Most of the tricks are
coarsening, except for comic effects which might be fun once in a while.
At least so my thoughts tend to run. Now, when I looked at
this image, there was much to like in the original -- the composition,
shadows, and range of tones was good, I thought, but the extreme telephoto
had degraded the sharpness to a damaging degree. What to do, throw
out the image? I remembered a watercolor effect in one of the programs,
and decided in desperation to try it on this image. To my surprise,
the effect was beneficial in this case -- it kept all that was good in the
image, and nullified the overly soft focus. So here it is. What
do you think?
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The creative
geometry of nature is sometimes hidden, and sometimes obvious, but it is
always interesting. Plants, I have read, developed in terms of a few
key "discoveries" -- metazoan formations, internal transfers of chemicals, vascular structures, cellulose scaffolding, leaves and stomata, and so on. From these relatively few mechanisms,
the stupendous variation in body form and lifestyle proceed. Observing
the way of plants is a lesson in the possibilities inherent in the meticulous
application of basic principles and forms. And, at no extra charge,
they are usually beautiful as well.
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Vision,
among other things, wouldn't be of too much use without that big yellow
ball in the sky providing the light that paints the world. Crossing
the tracks one day, I noticed the late afternoon sun was causing the old
rail to glow right through its coat of iron oxide. I decided to record
the phenomenon, of course.
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Squirrels
here are a bit on the shy side. I get shots of them a few times a
year. and frankly some of them are better than this one. However a)
this was taken in the month of August, and b) it shows better than all the
other images the impressive tail -- just the thing for a fellow, tired from,
oh, squirreling away nuts, to wrap in on chilly nights.
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This is
an old company office that, probably, grouchy guys with clipboards issued
from to direct the minutia of a long dead business. But now someone
is living there, and while there is little other sign of it, the someone
is revealed by the flowers lovingly tended. Ordinary people seem so
much greater by such signs than the ballyhooed vapidities of the public world.
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I took many
pictures of this plant -- it would take dozens to show the whole thing.
I don't know its name, but it lives in the woods in the same sort
of way as the wild grape. The leaves are broad, the seed case spiny,
and the binding tendrils reach out in spirals to anchor it as it goes. How
fundamentally strange such a being is that it has no nervous system, no brain
to process information, yet it "walks" from darkness to light, from plant
to plant, from tenuous crevice to spiraled grip. I noticed in one case
it had grasped a dead twig that was anchored only by a dead spiral that had
been put out perhaps by an ancestor plant, a helping hand from the past.
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Monarch
butterflies are far travelers. It takes two years, I think I've read,
and two generations to make the trip to Mexico and back. I always
notice them and count them privately among the "major" insects. This
one landed about 15 feet up on the shaded branch of a tree, so I risked a
full telephoto shot, with the exposure set according to the light on the
butterfly. That caused the sky to go blindingly white, but there are
ways, these days, with the electronic darkroom, to end up with the blue
sky you see.
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The growing
tip of the sumac is as impressive as any flower, and over the months I've
taken several pictures of this new growth. When I saw this against
its handy black post, I thought, yes, here it is so clearly revealed.
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The very ordinariness
of the House Sparrow has caused me to look more closely. One can hide
things in plain sight. I've noticed many of these little ones spend
a lot of time in the sort of shrubbery that is trimmed to shape. We
see the opaque green exterior of the shrub, but the interior is bare of
leaves, and contains large volumes of protected space where these sparrows
raise young and carry on a voluble society. Sometimes the whole bush
seems alive! I haven't been able to get any good shots in one of these
spaces, but this shot suggests the social nature of the birds -- even the
more open volume of this tree gives enough protection to foster conversation.
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This image
is one of several of flying ducks, but I chose it to show because of its
compositional simplicity and the abstracted patterns of the water, and to
be sure, because I like ducks just about anyway they choose to go.
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This image
was handed to me by whatever gods attend to digital photography. All
I did was see it, lift my camera, and shoot.
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Unlike the
last shot, this one involved taking maybe 6 or 8 images there among the
thistles with the bumblebees whizzing busily about. Settling down
finally, I saw a dark patch behind that would help with contrast. Mentally
pushing aside the complex shapes imploring to be photographed, I aimed for
the simpler part that shows the whole, waited for the bee to move a bit,
wait, ah, the shot. Let breath out. Hope.
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One of my
pet peeves is the application of the word "common" to any living thing.
(I also dislike naming any natural thing after a person, such as
Mount [some politician, explorer, etc.] or Gouldian finch as aborigines
had discovered the bird maybe forty thousand years before Mr. Gould did.)
Anyway this is the Common Merganser, a fish-eating duck, that has
stopped by my town on the way to some fishy place, though we do have fish
here, so maybe here is good enough for a while.
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I thought
this not a bad closing image for the month. Only late on a summer
afternoon does one see light like this, and I realized as I saw it that
such images are deep in my own memories of childhood, lazy days that seem
to have an endless quality, and I suspect that you can picnic under such
a tree on such a day with a fond friend and in a sense stay there contented
forever, passing some cheese or a bit of apple, while the years fly by,
age and misfortune and arthritis come as they may. Such is the magic
of summer.
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