Posts in Category: Sunday
Calla Lily. Happy Easter
I went to the store yesterday, at least in part, to buy an Easter Lily. I take the celebration of Easter seriously, with great joy! The resurrection of Jesus, and his living presence in us and among us is the core of my faith. Our traditional Easter Lilies generally catch an aspect of what I feel, but this year, their big showy trumpets just did not appeal. I think our local grocery giant may have ordered in the super-giant variety on the theory that if big showy lilies are good at Easter, bigger showy lilies would be better. Very American! I was, however, attracted to the smaller Calla Lilies they also had on display, and bought one to take home.
Part of the plan all along had been to photograph the lily for my Easter post, and I took it, with a black fleece jacket for background, out on the newly swept back deck for a session. The sun was at an interesting angle, there were half a dozen blooms in various stages, and I took a lot of exposures, from all angles, and processed the best.
It was only after processing the images that I thought to look up the Calla Lily and find out what I had brought home. It turns out (but many of you already knew this) that the Calla Lily is also known as the Easter Lily, especially in Britain and Ireland. In Ireland it is also associated with the fight for independence, a memorial to those who died in, and as a result of, the Easter Rising of 1916.
For me, the attraction was the quiet, but totally self-assured, grace of the blooms…and in this variety, the subtle shades of the rich royal purple. These images, I hope, catch just that.
Right now, the Calla Lily speaks to my faith more than the showy trumpets. I’d like to think of my faith that way. Quiet, totally assured, and full of grace. Approachable as the Calla Lily, and, in its own right, just as rich and beautiful. At least that is how I see it on this Easter Morning, as I watch the sunrise behind the trees of the back yard, and let the joy fill me!
Great Blue Heron on the Wing: Happy Sunday!
I mentioned yesterday that the Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus OH, where I am working the first ever Birding Optics and Gear Expo, turned out to be a much better birding spot than I would have expected. They have a large observation deck built out over a backwater of the Scoito River where, if appearances are anything to go by, there is an active heron rookery in late spring. It is early yet but there were at least 10 Great Blue Herons feeding within sight of the deck and at least one pair were actively working on a nest in a tall tree above the river. Because the deck is at least 30 feet above the surface of the water, it is an excellent place to attempt flight shots of the herons. The only challenge is that the window on the backwater is relatively narrow, and and closed in by tall trees and brush on either side, so you have to be quick to catch the herons in the gap.
As you can see in this image, for this bird, I was actually shooting through the branches of the trees on the left side of the window (note the straight dark bands which are out of focus limbs, and if you look closely you will see some smaller circular patches and arcs left by smaller brush.) But of course, in this case, the imperfections almost don’t matter. They are overwhelmed by the sharply focused spread of those majestic wings and the bright eye of the bird. In fact, to my eye, the out of focus foreground clutter adds an element of inescapable reality that improves the image. I could not have planned and executed this image if I had tried, but I am very happy to have caught it. 
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly for composition. ,
And for the Sunday Thought. Spiritual vision, I am thinking, should be a lot like this image. It should be so sharply focused on what is wonderful and amazing, majestic and awesome, that the foreground clutter all but disappears. And yet, while we are in this world, it is out of focus inescapable clutter that helps us to properly value the objects of our spiritual sight. This gives even the clutter value. The only tragedy would be to focus on the clutter, so that we miss the awesome vision that feeds our souls.
And I needed that reminder. I have been, this past week, way too focused on the clutter. It is not good for me. I need to get my spiritual eyes back on the awesome, if for no other reason, so that I can properly value the inescapable clutter.
Which is why I am particularly happy to have caught, just in time, so to speak, this Great Blue Heron on the wing!
Kestrel on the Hover: Happy Sunday!
While hiking at the Tijuana River Estuarine Reserve south of San Diego, I had a close encounter with an American Kestrel. She sat on the barbwire top strands of the Imperial Air Base fence hunting grasshoppers in the tall brush of the Reserve. She was so intent on her hunt that she paid little attention to me. There was no way to avoid walking past her, as that is were the path went. Twice she got up and moved down a few sections of fence, before finally circling back around to land on the fence behind me, very close to where I had first seen her. And she was still there, an hour later, when I came back by on my way to the car.
Of course I took a lot of pictures, both going and coming back.
In my world, the Kestrel shares favorite bird status with the Green Kingfisher, so this was a very special treat! On the way back, as I pushed by her, she got up and hovered over the brush. I had just the presence of mind to shove the control dial on the camera over to Sports Mode, and get off a burst of images while she hung in the air above me at 35 or 40 feet. The lead shot here is the best of the hover shots.
It was not until I got to processing the image that I realized what I had captured. Anyone who has ever watched Kestrels for any length of time knows they hover, but I, for one, had never thought about how they manage to do it. There are only a few birds that actually hover…that is, remain in one spot in the air, while beating their wings to maintain both altitude and position. Hover, as opposed to “kite”, which is, as the name implies, to hang in the air, weight balanced by force of the wind, with extended wings more or less stationary. It is a quiz I like to give when teaching birding. Name the birds that can hover. And then, name the birds that kite.
The hummingbird is the most obvious of the hoverers, and one almost everyone knows. I know, from my little study of hummingbirds, that they manage to hover so effectively because they, unlike most birds whose wings are relatively fixed at the horizontal, can rotate their wings on the axis of the wing to almost any position. Until I saw this image of the Kestrel, I had not thought through the implications. Rotating the wing toward the vertical is a requirement for any bird to truly hover. The bird has to spill air on the upstroke. And, from the image, the Kestrel actually does rotate at least the outer half of its wing to remain stationary. Amazing.
Now there might be many people who already know this about the Kestrel, but I was not one of them, and I have not found another in showing this image to quite a few birders. The Kestrel, like the hummingbird, can rotate at least part of its wing to the vertical. You learn something new every day!
And that brings us to the Sunday Thought. “You learn something new every day.” That is what attracts me to birding, and photography, and watching dragonflies and butterflies, and to reading, and to watching good movies, and to social media, and to the life of faith. You learn something new every day! I love to learn, even more than I love to know. The love of learning new things is a different motivation than the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge is the by-product. The satisfaction comes in the learning itself. And I truly believe that the love of learning is inherent to the human, to all of us in our native state. Like the children in Jesus’ parable, those who love learning, will inherit the kingdom of heaven. Those who love to learn…those who great every day, every moment, as an opportunity to learn…those who live to learn…are already well on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.
That Pelican Shot! Happy Sunday.
This post sort of follows up on yesterday’s gift theme hummingbird shot, but while the hummingbird shot was fairly unique, I have lots of pictures of Pelicans in flight. Pelicans are relatively easy, since they ride the updrafts at the crests of waves, often well inshore. One of my favorite places to photograph them is the Tide Pool area at Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma in San Diego. There, the combination of the wave lift and the lift of the abrupt cliffs brings the Pelicans in as close as you might like. Add the often vigorous breaking surf for a background and you have the makings of some good Pelicans in flight shots.
This year I also have the advantage of the new Canon SX50HS, with its Sports Mode. Sports Mode has proven to be ideal for birds in flight (ideal being a relative term…it certainly makes birds in flight very possible with what is, after all, still and Point and Shoot.) I have come to appreciate being able to spin the control dial to Sports, and catch an approaching bird in flight just about as fast as I can think to do it.
And sometimes Sports Mode surprises even me. This bird was coming so fast and so close that I only managed get it in the frame in time for a short burst. I had no time to pre-focus so I was pretty sure I had not gotten the shot. Imagine my delight when I got the images up on the computer! This is the first shot in the sequence. In the following shots the bird is already leaving the frame.
This one, as I see it, has it all. The light. The position of the wings. The foam of the heavy surf behind. It is a shot that I can look at for a long time! It makes me smile out loud!
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 80. Processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: Both this shot and yesterday’s hummingbird are shots that I could feel proud of. I am indeed very happy to have been able to take them, but, somehow, pride does not come into it. Pride would imply that my skill played a predominate roll in their creation…and that thought just amuses me. I mean, what part of the making of these images was not a gift?
I feel blessed to have a camera that can catch these moments. I had nothing to do with its creation. The engineers at Canon should be proud of the camera. I am just delighted to have it to use.
I feel blessed to have a job that takes me to places like San Diego, and justifies my spending time at Cabrillo National Monument watching the Pelicans fly by the Tide Pools. And I would have to say honestly, that while I do a good job at my job, by any objective standard I did not earn it…I just kind of fell into it…in a way that only builds my faith in a loving God. It is a gift that I am well aware of.
And even the eye to see the possibility of a shot like this when the bird is still in the air and the camera in its case…the appreciation of the wonder of nature around me that keeps me alive to photographic possibilities…and that drives me to keep taking pictures…that has grown in me since I was a child. It is so deeply part of who I am now that it just is. It continues to grow and develop without any conscious effort on my part. I consider a gift certainly…and more…a part of my inheritance as a child of God.
So where does pride come in? Delight? Certainly. Thanksgiving? Certainly. Like I say, shots like this make me smile out loud! And, far from making me proud…they keep me humble! Happy Sunday.
Ice Bound Mousam: Happy Sunday!
As I write we are awaiting the arrival of the 3rd weekend winter storm in three weeks. This one held off until Sunday, and is only forecast as 6-8 inches, but still! It is raining now, in Kennebunk, and has been for about 14 hours, but my weather app shows that we are just at the edge a small band of rain along the coast. This is snow falling a few miles inland.
This is a shot of the Mousam River behind Roger’s Pond, right after Nemo passed and left 29 inches of fresh snow behind. The Mousam here is rapid, and almost never gets ice bound. It was simply so overwhelmed with that amount of snow that the open channel was limited to the fastest water.
Canon SX50HS in Snow Mode. f5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 80. About 90mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness…with some extra attention to the highlights.
And for the Sunday Thought: I am getting old enough so that the part of me that looks forward to winter storms is well submerged…or at least well counterbalanced by the part of me that does not look forward to winter storms.
I will admit to a bit of a thrill, a tendency to check the weather radar to track the storm…and a bit of almost competitive interest in snow fall totals. I will admit to still feeling more than a bit of wonder and appreciation for its beauty when I face the landscape with its fresh blanket of snow. I can even revel in the raw energy of the storm, especially a good Nor’easter with the snow falling sideways and the wind loud in the trees.
But I no longer enjoy driving in such weather, and I certainly no longer enjoy shoveling out. I find the big mounds of dirty snow pushed up by plows and left to melt simply depressing. I am not a downhill skier, my cross country skis are stacked in seldom visited corner of the basement, and I have always been convinced that those who claim to actually enjoy snowshoeing are just working out some complex emotional issue.
So, on balance, the third winter storm in as many weekends does not fill me with joy.
And that is actually a little sad. There is a YouTube video going around of some young men just up the street from us who used the last two storms to produce a 15 foot tall snowman (search for Stanley the Snowman). Maybe I should go look at it…before the spiritual balance is forever tipped toward snow-dread and winter-phobia. Maybe I should keep a better hold on my winter wonder. I have a feeling that would be the healthy choice…unless I really am ready to move to Florida.
And of course, it is also a matter of faith. You can’t thank God for the weather when it suits you, and then blame God for the weather when it doesn’t. Not if you believe in a God who is love. If it is God blessing you with a sunny day…it must certainly be God blessing you with a snowy one. This might not stand to reason…but it certainly must be your stand in faith. 
And as I write this sentence, the rain is definitely turning to snow outside the window…drops morphing into flakes…flakes drifting down at an angle…getting bigger as I watch. 6-8 inches is suddenly believable.
Yes, winter storm G is upon us. I guess it is up to me how I feel about it.
The Anhinga is a Funny Bird: Happy Sunday!
Well “funny” is not quite the right word. “Odd” does not quite catch it either. “Weird” is a bit too strong. Maybe “strange”? The Anhinga is a funny bird. It has a neck like a snake, a beak like a saber, wings like an angel, and a body that looks to be covered in fur. What could be more strange? And it gets itself into the oddest contortions. This one was sunning and drying at the edge of the dyke at Viera Wetlands in Florida.
Canon SX50HS. 800mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: Though this picture was taken in Florida I am currently sitting in a hotel room in Boston at the leading edge of another New England blizzard hoping against hope to be able to get out of Boston after my daughter’s audition at the New England Conservatory this morning. Now that is just as funny as an Anhinga. Just as unlikely in as many ways. I remember feeling really blessed when I pulled up beside the Anhinga for this pic. I need to remember that this morning. God is everywhere all the time…as certainly in the blizzard in Boston as on a dyke at Viera Wetlands with the gift of a close Anhinga. I would like to go into the day with that thought and that feeling. God is. All else simply follows. 🙂
Blackpoint Drive Dawn: Happy Sunday!
Okay. We have 5 foot drifts of snow in the yard, the shoveled pile at the end of the drive is over 7 feet tall (thank you Nemo), and it is –2 degrees on the thermometer. It is a good morning to skip back, at least in spirit, two Sundays to this “chilly” dawn on Blackpoint Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. They are promising that it will warm up into the 30s in Southern Maine today, with clear sky and lots of sunshine, so tomorrow you will very likely see a winter snow scene here. But for today, let us remember warmer times and warmer places 
This was one of those dawns when the sun kissed the mists over the marsh, and, in a few more moments after this shot, turned the grasses gold. This is the spot where the flock of Ibis flew in to join the egrets feeding (Ibises in the Dawn), where the Snowy perched in a tree against the gold (Google+)…this is the place where the Wood Stork settled and posed against the warm light (Woodie!). It is hard, in our culture, to avoid using the word “magical” to describe such an experience…except that magic has no place in my chosen view of the world. It was a blessed dawn. It was dawn full of grace and wonder. It was an awesome dawn in every sense.
Technically, to capture just a glimmer of that wonder, I shot this image using In-camera HDR Mode, with the Canon SX50HS on my little Fat Gecko shock-cord carbon fiber tripod. There was a Refuge sign on the right that stuck into the frame, and a bit of the gravel and sand of the pull-out showing in the bottom right corner. I used the clone tool in PhotoShop Elements 11 to paint out the sign and fill in the gravel, and cropped and processed the image for full effect in Lightroom.
And for me, veering off into the technical this way does not diminish the wonder of the experience at all. I am truly thankful, and can even spare a little awe , for the engineers and image scientists at Canon who make a shot like this relatively easy with today’s best Point and Shoot cameras. I even give thanks for the Fat Gecko tripod, which I take places like this where I would not pack a “real” tripod. And, of course, the folks at Adobe who work on PhotoShop Elements and Lightroom deserve a huge measure of gratitude. They are so much a part of my creative process that I find it hard to imagine working without them. Even my Toshiba Ultrabook is essential to the experience. Finally, there is this medium…the internet, Facebook, Google+, WordPress, all working together to allow me to share the experience with you.
And it all comes together in the image…or rather in the experience of creating the image…in responding to the dawn by attempting to catch what I can of it, and of sharing it with you.
So there is no specific Sunday Thought today. Just the image and the experience, from seeing to capture to processing to sharing. There is the wonder. There is awesomness shot all through, like the light of dawn kissing the marsh and turning it to gold.
Aerial Dance! Happy Sunday!
When I was at Viera Wetlands on Martin Luther King Day this past week, there were thousands of Tree Swallows. The longer the day went on, the more there were. Just after noon, they clouded the sky when they gathered. I think they were maybe just arriving from points north as there was a lot of jockeying around any likely nest hole (and there are a lot of potential nest holes at Viera). I put the SX50HS in Sports Mode and shot many sequences of the action around the various palm and pine snags. I can not really say for sure what I was seeing…territorial conflict?…early stages of courtship?…only that whatever it was it was beautiful. There is almost nothing so agile or so graceful as a swallow in flight. If it is not the visual inspiration for ballet, then it ought to be.
These images are cropped slightly from full frame, as I zoomed back to 500mm equivalent field of view to follow the action, and the snags were well out in the ponds, but the quality holds up well. SX50HS. Sports Mode. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought. I can never figure out how any human being can be unmoved by nature. I find it hard to believe that anyone who is remotely clinging to any kind of spiritual life could look at swallows swarming around a snag in their aerial dance, and not feel the stirrings of wonder. I can not believe they are not lifted at least a little out of themselves and set free in some corner of their souls to soar with the swallows. I can not believe that the intensity of those little lives in such close and intricate interaction…so fiercely independent and yet so coordinated, so synchronized, so responsive to each other that their flight looks to us to have been choreographed…does not awaken awe in any human being.
Happy Sunday!
Still Life with Tomatoes: Happy Sunday!
Yesterday morning while wandering through the kitchen I saw these two tomatoes sitting on the counter with their split stem, and just had to go get my camera and do some still lives. I turned a closer shot into paintings in three different styles yesterday, but this is the shot I originally saw, before I even went for the camera. There is something about the variations in greens when compared to the red of the fruit that really catches my eye. Then too, I found the subtle molding of the tomatoes by the mix of ceiling and window light very attractive.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 24mm macro plus 1.5x digital tel-extender. f3.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1250. (And who would have believed, even two years ago, that a small sensor P&S like the Canon could produce this kind of quality at 1250 ISO??) Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, using my hyper-real preset.
And for the Sunday thought. Almost all my posts over the past month have been images from my last trip…to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and then the same valley in New Mexico. Birds, bugs, and landscapes in the bright, dramatic southwestern light. That is because we are having a totally uninteresting winter in Maine…photographically. Sunny days with no clouds over bare trees and brown landscapes…or murky days with a mix of rain and snow and very low light levels. I have gotten a few squirrel shots out the back door, and I put up a feeder and filled it with high quality seed…but apparently there is still so much fodder left in the bare woods and hedges that the local birds are not greatly tempted by my feeding station. When they come, it is always when the light is lowest, just before or just after a bout of rain with a few snow flakes mixed in.
I am not complaining. Really. I have been spending time building ebooks of the Bosque, my local Rachel Carson shots, and, currently, of pictures taken over the past several years in and around Acadia National Park. Still, I am getting an itch for new images. Which is why the tomatoes appealed so strongly.
I need to be creating. Oh, building ebooks might be considered a creative task in some sense…but it is more curative than creative…and not really a satisfying substitute. I need to newly frame the world and press the shutter button and process the results into a new image. I need to do that. It is a hunger. It is a spiritual hunger. I need it not for today’s life but for the eternal life that is in me. I need it to be who I am in the spirit.
And that is why the tomatoes caught my eye. And that Is why I am sharing them with you. 🙂
Happy Sunday! And may you find today, that which satisfies the creative spirit within you.
4 in the Afternoon Glow: Happy Sunday!
Late in the day, in that brief interval between afternoon and evening, the low sun turns the fields and fall cottonwoods at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to gold. The mountains to the west, as the shadows lengthen, are molded and contoured, sculpted. The Sandhill Cranes are restless. They know it will soon be time to move to night quarters…to find shallow water to stand in while they sleep…and they are moving, in small groups, field by field, closer. The angle of the sun is such that the wings, those great wings, are often lit, as they land, as much from below as above. This is the Bosque at its most subtle, and, in many ways, most beautiful.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Zoomed back from full to about 700mm to catch the group. f5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The image looks even better a bit larger. Click it to open the lightbox, auto-sized for your monitor, on WideEyedInWonder.
And for the Sunday Thought: It is the between times that are often most beautiful to us as human beings…dawn and dusk…early sun and late. We pause. We ponder. We are just a bit more open to the wonder. Those are the times when unsuspected beauty is revealed in quite ordinary circumstances. 4 birds, 4 cranes, coming in for a landing. The world is thinner, with the light edge on to every solid thing, and the spirit shows through. 🙂