The pickings are getting mighty thin, flowerwise, anyway. I’m glad to see that the pollinators are still finding plenty of pollen. This was shot at North Mountain Park with the 180 mm macro lens on the Canon 7D MarkII. I cropped this one from horizontal to vertical, added a high pass filter and a texture and tweaked the exposure a little.
I thought I would try something a little different. This image is from the files, taken back in August when I was experimenting with the 7D with a telephoto lens and extension tube at the rose garden. The original was close to monochome but more yellow. I decided to give it a black and white treatment with a sepia tone. I wasn’t completely happy with that so I lowered the opacity and let just a little of the color bleed through from the original. Now I’m happy. Hope you like it.
The thing about these Lensbaby lenses I’ve been using is it is really, really hard to find that sweet spot of focus and you have to try several shots and hope you got one right. But when you nail it, as I did (completely by accident) on this image it is almost jaw droppingly sharp. And the bee showed up at just the right time too. This was taken at North Mountain Park with the Sol 45 on the Canon M3. I added a high pass filter and a texture in post processing.
A few days ago I posted a picture of a bunch of these flowers under the title “Round Blue Mystery Flowers”. I later learned that they are called Blue Globe Thistles. The official count for the BC trip is 1255 images. Of course, some are duplicates and not all are flowers but still I have plenty to draw from. But it would not be in the spirit of the project to rest on my laurels. I just needed a day to chill out today. I promise, I will get back in the field tomorrow. I’ve got my pictures all transferred and backed up and I’m starting to try and figure out how to scrapbook this trip since so many of the images are of flowers. On this one I again just adjusted the exposure a little and added a high pass filter for sharpening and just a touch of vibrance. Otherwise pretty much straight out of the camera.
It was so smokey this morning I had to cut my walk short. The upside of all this smoke is the beautiful diffused light. I took the M3 out for a walk with the Sweet 50 and an extension tube. I was almost home when I decided to take another stab at my neighbor’s lavender. This bee came along and just as I was about to give up on him he struck the right pose and I nailed the focus. Yes, photography is sometimes a game of chance. Today I got lucky.
I’ve just completed a scrapbook documenting my year in photography and photo artistry so over the past month I have looked at almost all of the nearly 12,000 images in my files for 2017. This one stood out for me to be the image of the year. I love the subject, I love the colors, and I love remembering how excited I was when this beautiful creature came along to pose for me. Next project is to go through the files again and weed out the clunkers.
And for my poetry fans, I just cleared all the poetry books out of my office and in honor of my upcoming trip to Japan I have made a new year’s resolution to do a haiku every day in 2018. So this one is a warm up:
Monarch Butterfly
Threatened by our careless ways
I am steeped in awe.
-Jeanne Hoadley
The Sorrow of Love
The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,
The full round moon and the star-laden sky,
And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,
Had hid away earth’s old and weary cry.
And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears,
And all the trouble of her laboring ships,
And all the trouble of her myriad years.
And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,
The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,
And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves,
Are shaken with earth’s old and weary cry.
-William Butler Yeats
Raining again but I had more good pictures from Ashland Pond yesterday so why not share. I’m not sure if this little guy was trying to get a better look at me or just fluffing his feathers but I was glad to see him dip his head below that little branch that had been obscuring the picture before. And here’s something from Yeats that is not quite so dense as the last one. He’s growing on me.
Untitled Shaman Song
The great sea
frees me, moves me,
as a strong river carries a weed.
Earth and her strong winds
move me, take me away,
and my soul is swept up in joy.
-Uvavnuk (Iglulik Eskimo, 19th century) [translated by Jane Hirshfield]
I was going to go out for a camera walk but it was so windy I thought I would never get a good photograph because nothing would hold still. So I started looking around the house and decided to photograph some of my knick-knacks. I think I came by this Spirit Bear at Indian Market in Santa Fe one year but he has been with me long enough, I don’t really remember. I wanted to give him a more ethereal quality so added some textures and gave him a Georgia O’Keefe treatment in Topaz Impression (how appropriate!) Then I started looking for a poem. Not many poems about spirit bears and surprisingly few about bears, spirit animals, etc. I finally turned to gratitude in homage to Thanksgiving and nothing tripped my trigger there either. I finally found an anthology of Spiritual Poetry on the Poetry Foundation website and while Eskimos and spirit bears may not be a good fit, the Native American connection with nature and spirituality worked for me.
Sweet Coyote
Don’t ask, don’t tell,
Sweet coyote, desert owl.
Cactus eyes, sand-dune skin
The warmth throughout, the heat within.
-Sarah Spang
I decided that I had invested enough time at the wildlife refuge yesterday to skate a little today. And there were so many good pictures that I hated to not share them. This coyote is marred by the bit of out of focus weed in front of his/her face but given that I had only a split second to get the shot before coyote moved I think it turned out pretty well. I was convinced that I had not held the camera steady enough but the eyes are sharp and that’s what counts.
Snow Geese
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was
a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun
so they were, in part at least, golden. I
held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us
as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,
but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.
The geese
flew on,
I have never seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won’t.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.
-Mary Oliver
I’ ve been trying for months to find the time and right weather conditions for a trip over the mountain to the Klamath Basin Wildlife Refuges. My calendar and the weather forecast finally aligned today so I said “I don’t care what else I have on my to do list. I’m going.” And I’m glad I did. I came home with over 300 images though I suppose most of them will have to go to the recycle bin. Those critters just refuse to sit still. But I was pleased to see some snow geese at Tule Lake and though I did see a few bald eagles and even got their portraits this image spoke to me most about the joy seeing the birds lift off in a flock as one. I thought about using Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese, which is my all time favorite but I thought “No, everyone has heard that one.” So when my google search turned up another Mary Oliver poem about snow geese, I was delighted, as I am delighted to share it with you.