Photo Page 0903

The month of September, 2003 continued the overcast and rain of previous months. Even so, there were lots of photo opportunities, and interesting matters to consider while behind the camera.

	When there is free food in the water, the ducks and fish compete directly with each other (in fact it's every being for itself) and are a bit wild and crazy. Here a father and son are taking in the action.




	Notice in the shot below, that a fish has turned to its left to avoid swimming up on a shallow shelf, and it finds itself overtaken by a hungry mallard hen. For the moment captured here, the fish finds itself with its chin resting on the duck's shoulder, and no doubt feeling a bit aggrieved.




	All that rain has awakened the sleepy creek nearby. A natural dam had formed in the past, and the water pushes through it in boiling white froth.




	Trees do want to lean out over the stream to get more light, but they need to be well-anchored to do that. Meanwhile the stream undercuts the bank and licks away the soil. The tree will lose the fight eventually, but until then, it binds itself to every pebble and thimble's worth of soil, and remains in the game.




	Well, game is not quite the right word, of course. Life and death are not a game for the individuals involved. Yet, it is not a wholly wrong analogy. The stakes are simply higher, in fact they are the very highest -- that of survival. I suspect about any analogy is wanting in perfect aptness to the daily aborning, questing, and dying of the beings of the natural world. Below we see two fat mullein plants that find themselves growing about 4 feet up in a crevice on an abandoned loading dock. As far as the plants know, all is well and they will be able to scatter the seeds of their kind to the air. But I returned to this area three weeks later, and due to some sporadic construction, the plants were obliterated.




	Here begins the architectural section for this month. I have photographed this house before, but from an acute angle to show off the details of the porch. The shot was the first I took that day, and it helped settle me into the unique mood of a photographer on the prowl. The lady in the red dress is pure serendipity of the type that gladdens the hearts of photographers.




	People at one time often built for generations to use the result. There was a sense of civic pride and general respect for the opinion of posterity. A combination of brick, stone, and concrete not only made for a long-lasting building, but one that looked it as well -- solid!




	Contrast the above with this astonishingly shoddy modern building technique. Though the fundamental support is probably steel, the rest is light wood framing with a thin layer of plywood (some use chipboard), plasticized cardboard, and finally, a layer of styrofoam with concrete stucco over that. So, a great many of our modern buildings would dissolve like the Potemkin structures they are, if water and wind got to them. As to what a screwdriver-wielding vandal could do to the styrofoam -- I leave that to your imagination. I suppose the next logical step is for these things to be made in giant forms in Maylasia or China and strewn by helicopter over America.




	To recuperate from that last image, here is a detail of an old mill not too far from the park. The light was right as I stood a few feet from speeding traffic to get this. The cast iron stars are decorative, but they are in effect giant washers on very long bolts that provide horizontal strength for the high brick walls.




	I have taken many photos of this pair of prolific pigeons and their squabs and fledglings. Their nest is the only one that is easily accessible to the photographer from among all the many pigeon nests in my town. Yet it is always dimly lit, and most of the shots are too low in contrast to use in a photo page. This shot was particularly grainy, but as I looked at it again and again, I found there was a simple unity to the image that I liked. I worked with it to emphasize the forms, but most of what you see is what was in the original image. These two are a long-time mated pair in their own space.




	This is a fledgling pigeon just out of the nest. The nest is in the support beams of a store that sits over a mill race, so fledglings sometimes end up drowning in the water, or if they are agile, they end their first flight in relative safety. This young bird isn't doing so well -- it is standing in wet mud, rather exposed to predators. Look carefully and you'll see the bits of scraggly baby down protruding through its feathers, and the primary feathers have a cap of sheath still attached. At this stage, as far as I can see, the bird is reluctant to fly -- it either isn't quite sure how to do it, or it wants to stay where its parents can find it. Probably this is the most vulnerable time of the bird's life, excepting a very rare feeble old age.




	As nice as it would be to be able to get a shot like this at will, it is usually the result of a lot of shooting and throwing away most of the resulting shots. The pigeon at left has just taken off, it needs to generate a lot of lift quickly. According to photographer-author Stephen Dalton (The Miracle of Flight), a partial vacuum is formed when wings that are clapped together on the upstroke are rapidly separated at the beginning of the downstroke. The effect of this is to gain a considerable lift.




	I watched this trout for quite a while. It was tracing out a long flattened oval swimming pattern that carried it repeatedly through a section of water where water was splashing down from a storm drain pipe. I wondered why that was so fascinating to the fish. Was the feeding somehow better there? Did it like the gentle vibrations of the water? The flashing lights from above? Mysteries...




	I have not seen chipmunks in the park at all, but on my way there one day, I passed a landscaped area in front of some stores, and found myself seriously scrutinized. Of course I scrutinized back, camera in hand, and got this shot.




	In the midst of photographing the chipmunk, I noticed this form and its shadow. Imagine some mixing of Luther Burbank, Marcel Duchamp, and Henry Moore, then applying that artistic mix to a image of a lady of fashion hurrying down the boulevard -- voila!




	The core of the local population of Mallard ducks stays year around, and as viewers of these pages know, their photogenic qualities are much appreciated by the photographer. As a river is a moving feast to a duck, the trick is to get a good seat at the table. A log, temporarily jammed in the falls, becomes a handy feeding station for this drake.




	Timing may or may not be everything, but it is a useful sense to have. This hen is about two seconds from takeoff, yet she is a cool customer, content within herself. Having fast reflexes is a feature of duckiness.




	Sometimes, rare times, the elements of a future picture come together in advance of the actual scene -- one sees the potential, as well as actual, image in the viewfinder. For a second or two there is a little dance of repositioning, focusing while the components of the image adjust themselves to be just where one thought they would, and the shutter clicks at the tip of the moment -- ah.




	I continue to find inspiration in the doings of ducks.




	These beautiful seed pods dry quickly and become brown and bedraggled, but in this phase they are beautiful forms..




	Homo sapiens too produces attractive forms -- these are flexible ventilation pipes stacked and ready to go. I think I saw them as interesting because I had been focusing, that day, on plant forms, and imagining the internal structures of plants, so, when I came upon these, I didn't see them merely as utilitarian hardware.




	I found this lush vision of color back of a construction area among the junk. I tried one of the red globes and it wasn't bad, and I didn't die. I wondered where the creatures that eat these berries have gone -- nature has put on the show, but where is the appreciative audience? More questions...




	Here's a sort of Halloween image, I suppose. Near the park is a business that has late hours, and has a recessed light in its outside overhanging roof. No less than four of this species of enterprising spider had constructed webs under that light. Two of the webs intersected each other. As it is the wont of various insects to fly toward the light, it provided a busy and rewarding activity for the spiders.




	I plucked this image out of a line of traffic waiting for the light to change.




	For the last image, this seems appropriate. A park is, among other things, a place to come and just sit, gaze, and contemplate. I remember once being in a neighboring town and asking a local person the location of their park. Turning to another local, the person asked "I don't think we have one, do we?" And I thought "Fui, I'm leaving, a place without a park isn't a real place." I'm lucky enough to live in a real place where people like the woman below can come and just sit and think her own thoughts while the stream glides by.