Posts in Category: Sunday
Fan Palm. Happy Sunday!
For us northerners (or at least for me), there is nothing more emblematic of being in the south-land, in the sub-tropics, in Mediterranean climes, than the Palm tree. I feel it in, say, San Diego, but it is especially evident (again, to me) in the forest understory of fan palms in the dappled winter sun filtered through live oak draped in hanging fern. (Of course, in the Southeastern sub-tropics, there is sweet tea too 🙂
This is an HDR treatment, to emphasize what the light is doing with the palm. Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 70mm equivalent field of view. ISO 200 @ 1/80th @ f6.3. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought. I am always reminded, when I see palms, of the Palm Story Sunday, and how much of the visual imagery of the Bible we northerners can so early miss. The land where Jesus walked is Mediterranean, and as he was fully man, it had to have gotten into his thought. It certainly influenced the words and images the Gospel story is told in. How different would the Bible be, not in its essential truths, but in the telling, if it had been written in England…or, say, Maine? Not that it would matter. Still, the imagery of the Bible is an exotic to me, upstate New York born and bred, and New Englander by choice, as the Fan Palms in the understory, in the filtered winter light of a live oak glade.
Wood Island Light over Snow Drifts. Happy Sunday!
This shot is from just a week ago, on my Sunday photo-prowl which turned into an Owl-prowl when I decided to go looking for Snowy Owls. East Point in Biddeford Pool is, when there are Owls in for the winter, always a likely place…with significantly more sightings than anywhere else on the southern coast of Maine. They are often there, even in winters when they are rare in the US, and in this irruption year, birders have found as many a 10 in a day there. There were three this Sunday along what they call Mile Stretch, all clinging to chimney pots. I featured one in Monday’s post. There is, however, no Owl in this image. I was just fascinated by the way the wind had sculpted the snow drifts along the top of the drop off the edge of East Point to the stoney beach below. I also featured a close-up of the wind sculpting early last week. 🙂
For this shot I used 218mm equivalent field of view on the zoom…medium telephoto…to compress the drift and the lighthouse, while keeping both in focus. The Lighthouse is close to 3/4 of a mile (according to Google Maps) across the Saco River channel. ISO 100 @ 1/1500th @ f5.3. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought: On the way back from my trip to office in Virginia, which was sandwiched in between the photo above and my Friday travel day, I was seated on the plane next to a youngish priest, returning to his parish in Augusta from a visit with his brother’s family where his brother is working in Rome. We got talking about what we each did, and when I told him that I work with the birding community, the conversation turned to why people watch birds, and that, of course, lead to my often shared theme of how birds exemplify the creator’s delight in color and form and texture and sound and the vividness of life in general. The young priest agreed that God, in creation, is neither reticent or circumspect, and lamented the fact that more of that sense of outrageous life has not gotten expressed in the church. I pointed out that, at one time, it had…certainly in Italy, where he had just been, and where he studied, in both the visual arts and music. It is in the ornamentation of the cathedral and the music of Vivaldi, certainly. He agreed and wondered where it had gone. What happened to the impulse to share in the creator’s creation by creating beautiful, outrageously vivid works that point the heart to God? When did the church become a social movement, a charitable movement, even, though he shuddered a bit when he said it, a political movement?
It is still there of course…that impulse to wild beauty…it has just moved, largely, and sadly, outside the walls of the Catholic Church…though we both agreed that it is always trying to break back in…always coming up between the paving stones, so to speak, and attempting to flourish once more between the walls. I mean, it is part of the God we worship…part of our inheritance as children of God and people of faith. Wild beauty is born in us with Christ. It is not like any amount of officious administration, any amount of what he called “religiosity”, can suppress it for long.
And it is not like we do not see it all around us every day, even with our eyes half open. It is here in this image…in the way the wind sculpted the snow. Oh I know there is a physics behind it…but that is like saying there is chemistry behind paint or mechanics behind dance…the artistry of those drifts can not be denighed. Or that’s what I think…and I am bold enough to say that the architect of the Wood Island Light was infected by it, and the principals of the Nature Conservancy as well, when they put aside East Point as a sanctuary to preserve, among other things, this view…a view of the wild, outrageous beauty that God and man has made on the coast of Maine.
So, Happy Sunday. There is always hope!
Titmouse. Happy Sunday!
I am not sure what this bird has been into. It looks like it might be spider web…but on this day with a foot of fresh snow on the ground, I don’t know where the Titmouse would have found a web. It could be cocoon material…or it might just be fine breast feathers from preening. The bird landed on the rail of the deck, about 3 feet from the thermopane window while I was photographing birds at the deck feeding station. I got off this one good shot before it moved on…probably right after looking up, as it clearly is here, and seeing me behind the glass. This is a full frame, uncropped shot, and taken from about as close as the Canon SX50HS will focus at the long end of the zoom. Though some detail is lost to the thermopane, at this distance there is detail to spare!
Canon SX50HS. 1200mm equivalent field of view. ISO 640 @ 1/750th @ f6.5. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is rare for me to post a bird, or any animal, image on Sunday…though at least one third, going on one half, of my photographs overall must be birds (and bugs). I am not sure why…perhaps because, in season, I already post a lot of birds and bugs, and Sunday should have something different…on the theory that different means special. Birds and bugs are my ordinary…Sunday should be, in the spirit of celebration, extraordinary (or at least unordinary, if we can not manage extra).
Or maybe, though I hope this is not true, it is because the single-minded self-centered will to live that is so evident in the feathered and winged somehow obscures the spirit for me. That would be sad, and if true, is certainly something I hope will be fixed before I am finished. 🙂
Because, of course, that single minded, self-centered will to live is a projection. The bird is not aware of being self-centered or single-minded. It is only aware, if you can call it awareness, of the will to live. It, in fact, simply is the will to live.
It appears that only we humans, who share that same will to live, as it is an essential expression of the Spirit in space and time, have to guard against the single-minded and self-centered aspect of it. We have been given the gift of care…the gift of knowing, of realizing, that we share time and space with the Titmouse, and that we must make room for the Titmouse to live beside us. We have been given the gift of knowing that we share time and space with each other…beyond the bounds of mate and nestlings, flock and kind, we know we share time and space with all that is, and, at our best, when the Spirit is most full in us, we care. That gift of caring, that gift of love, is, I think, what it means to be human. If we have a special place in the heart of the Creator, and I believe we do, it is because we have inherited the gift of care for all that is that is at the core of creation. That is an awesome, and an aweful gift…and our movement toward embracing it is the measure of our true humanity…of the progress of the Spirit in us.
And maybe that is why I don’t post more images of birds on Sunday. 🙂
Happy Sunday!
Snow Light. Happy Sunday!
I took a walk around the loop trail at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters Friday morning after our last 4 inches of snow. It was early. The forest was still, the snow lay undisturbed, and the shadows were long. It was altogether wonderful.
This image needs to be viewed full screen to see what I saw in it. It was the light coming through the sharp drift of snow on the branch that caught my eye, but then, as I lifted the camera, some minor movement higher in the trees…maybe just a branch flexing as the sun touched the cold center of it…shook loose a million tiny frost crystals which fell through the light. I was not at all sure that the camera would catch them…or even the primary light through the snow on the branch…but it did. A little processing in Snapseed clarified the effects.
And for the Sunday Thought: I woke this morning from one of those dreams that feels like it has larger significance, and lay there, as I sometimes do (as you probably sometimes do) in that plasma state between waking and sleep where the mind examines the dream and pushes it out along its streams of significance…making sense of it…or, as it sometimes happens…rearranging our sense of reality just enough to contain the significances of the dream. I had reached one of those points of singular illumination, where many things that I had thought and done before were connected by a web of light, and where the web stretched at least a little way past where I am…before I shook off sleep completely and turned over. I then lay there and wondered what I was supposed to do with it? How could I share it? How could I even begin to weave a conscious web of insight and words that would convince anyone else…or even connect with anyone else’s experience enough to be understood? And yet I felt, and still feel, a deep conviction that I am supposed to share…not the message of the dream, specifically…but the message of my life so far…that sharing it is what I am tasked, asked, and expected to do.
About then was when I remembered that it is Sunday. That it is is time for the Sunday Thought. That my first task of the day would be to find an image from the past few days to post that would carry the freight of a Sunday Thought.
This image. This is one of the places where the spirit shows through…where it is more than usually obvious that life is matter animated by spirit…that the world we live in is alive…and that it is all a great dance of being. Snow on a branch. Frost crystals falling. Light and shadow. Image and reality. Dreams and waking. Knowing and sharing.
It is all about the light shining through.
Joy to the World! Happy Sunday!
We waited to decorate the house for Christmas until my youngest daughter came home from college. We don’t do a lot. A tree with its collection of ornaments built up over our life together, a few creches, each with its own history, and a string of lights…but it makes the house festive and fills it with memories of Christmas past…and hope for the future 🙂
This is a hand-carved creche we found in Albuquerque’s Old Town, years ago, and it is still one of my favorites. It came from a Christmas Shop that was, litterally, filled with creches and was, at the time, one of the few we could afford. One of the wise men has gone missing over the years, but we still put it out every Christmas. It is elegant in its simplicity. And here, where the girls happened to place it this year, it forms an interesting tableau with the Christmas Cactus hanging over it. Interesting enough for a natural light photo.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F. Smart Auto set the exposure to its Low Light mode and captured the scene at ISO 200. Processed as an HDR in Snapseed and then fine tuned using the Tune Image and Detail tools. Cropped slightly at the sides.
And for the Sunday Thought: The image is both exotic, highly unlikely, with the ornate blossoms of a cactus native to the coast of south-eastern Brazil, grown now, for many years, here in Southern Maine, hanging over a creche bought in Albuquerque New Mexico, and carved, if I remember rightly, somewhere in Asia…and homely in its simplicity. The carving is rough…simple…suggesting the subjects more than rendering them, and the composition is casual but studied, with each figure placed to please. The whole reaches toward, and is charged with, a celebration of the birth in the stable…which was certainly both exotic in its unlikely juxtaposition of the earthly and the divine…and humble in itself. The light here, spilling in at the edges, catches every detail, and makes the colors burn with intensity. It is a fitting image, I think, to convey at least a little of the totally unlikely birth that changed the world…and goes on changing it, one person at a time, as individuals identify with the story, and are touched by the loving reality behind it…as the light breaks in at the edges, and makes the colors of love burn with a transforming intensity.
Happy Sunday! And a Joyous Christmas to you and yours!
Scary Sunday (Snowy) Selfie. Happy Sunday!
We are getting our first major winter storm here in Southern Maine today. It started before mid-night and by this morning there was nearly a foot on flat ground and considerably more where it has already drifted. My wife, Carol, had to be at Church by 7:30 so we were both out before dawn, shoveling. Of course, it had drifted the driveway full. She is gone, and I am not done yet by far (besides it is not supposed to stop snowing until noon anyway, and the plow has already put 5 inches back in the end of driveway). It is time for a breakfast break. Hot oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon. Hot oatmeal was specifically invented for mornings like this…I am convinced! And, of course, a cup of hot chi.
Carol refused to give me a kiss when she left, and as soon as I realized why, I was inspired to this slightly scary Christmas themed and Sunday selfie. Didn’t someone say it was the year of the selfie? I can play too! Just, please, if you have small children in the house, please shield them from this. I would not want be responsible for planting this as a Christmas memory in any young mind. 😉
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought: My sincere prayer this morning is for anyone who has to be out in this weather…especially travelers on the highways. I pray too for wisdom among those who might be tempted to go out, without urgent need. This is no morning to be brave. I might get out sometime after noon, if the snow tapers off, for a photo-prowl, but only if the the roads are passable by then. No, this is a morning to draw the comfort of home around you and think cheerful, thankful thoughts. And that inspires a prayer for those who are without the comforts of home…the basic necessities of shelter and warmth and food today, in this storm or out of it. And considerable thanksgiving. Even if I froze my beard shoveling, and even if I will have to do it again before the end of the storm, I know I am blessed well beyond the basic necessities.
Carol might even give me a kiss when she gets home.
Winter Pond. Happy Sunday!
Except for family shots at Thanksgiving, I had not taken any pictures since getting back from New Mexico…almost two weeks! I admit I was not inspired by the rainy early winter weather in Southern Maine. When we woke, yesterday, to an inch or so of fresh snow, I knew it was time to take the camera and get out. The weather forecast promised sun for later in the day, but at 7 AM, the sky was still closed with the last of the snow clouds. I knew the snow on the trees would not survive more than a few moments of sun, so it was now or never…no time even for breakfast.
I brushed the snow off the car and headed down toward the beach. Here in Southern Maine you never know if there will be snow right at the shore. Often the closer you get to the great heat sink of the ocean, the thinner the snow gets. Not so yesterday. Even right at the shore, the Beach Roses were well coated. After a half hour or so photographing the snowy marsh and beach, I headed down Route 9A to see what else I could find. By now, the clear sky of the cold front was attempting to push the snow clouds out to sea, and the sky was wonder…with dark clouds breaking up, and light breaking through around the edges. There was not enough snow on the ground to keep me from pulling off at what I call Back Creek Pond #2. It has featured in these posts many times before. It is right by the road, but it has the look of somewhere truly wild in every season.
I framed the winter pond every-which-way, but this is one of my favorites…a low angle with enough zoom to get just the narrow end of the pond and a patch of that wonderful sky…with the snow laden trees overhanging the frosted ice. The branch hanging in from the top, far from spoiling the image, adds a vital element to the composition (at least to my eye, there will undoubtedly be those who see it differently).
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Smart Auto. ISO 100 @ 1/320th @ f3.9. 50mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 using the HDR Scene filter, some Ambiance and Shadow Control under Tune Image, and both Sharpening and Structure under Detail.
And for the Sunday Thought: Photography, making images, is one of the primary ways I connect with the world around me, and Photography, sharing those images, is one of the primary ways I connect with the larger social world of like minds and kindred spirits…but it is more than that. While I can, in any moment of true consciousness, see through to the spirit that animates the world around me, the spirit I share with all that lives and all that is…when I have a camera in my hand I am, just by the nature of my photographic intention, forced to do so. After all, when all is said and done, that spirit is what I am trying to capture…that spirit that is all in all and is always expressed as beauty…whether in a still winter pond, or a close up of a bird foraging berries, or in the faces of realatives. In that way, the camera is my crutch. With it I walk in a world of wonder where too often I only crawl. And that is okay. I am not at all ashamed of needing a crutch to walk. And, if you will, the camera is also my basket…it allows me to gather and share some of the walking wonder in a world were we all, where all of us, too often only crawl.
To touch the creative spirit of all that is…to share that touch with my fellows…that is what life is…that is what makes life worth living.
And I am thankful for the privilege of doing it, this morning. I am thankful for my crutch…for the camera and tablet and software of my current imaging process. I am thankful for the world of like minds and kindred spirits that I have found on Google+, and Facebook, and Twitter, and in the blog-sphere. But mostly I am thankful for the spirit that is, in however small a way, me in this moment, and that is beauty in all that is. To be part of that beauty. That is what life is…that is what makes life worth living.
So I give you a still pond in winter, with snowy pines overhanging, and light breaking through the heavy sky. Certainly that is enough.
Happy Sunday!
Any landing… Happy Sunday!
They say “any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.” I have flown enough over the past 10 years to appreciate the sentiment. Watching Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese land can only reinforce the truth of the statement. Snow Geese, and Cranes especially, seem always on the brink of disaster as they land. Of course it complicates matters that they will land in the middle of feeding flock…never at the edge…and never with anything like a clear runway. They always set down in just enough space to stand up in. It is just the way they are made, I assume, since there are certainly easier ways to get on the ground. 🙂
This is a Sports Mode shot from the Canon SX50HS on a morning with snow on the ground and still in the air. ISO 640 @ 1/1250th @ f6.5. Processed in Snapseed and Photo Editor on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought: there must, actually, be saints, who, like the Cranes and Geese, always look on the brink of disastor. Landing among their fellows, coming in from celestial flights and realms of glory, they always seem, to the casual eye, to be frantically backpaddling wings, and concentrating on getting their feet down safely. It runs counter to the image of the Saint…the person at peace in perfect knowledge of the divine…but I suspect that we miss seeing a good number of Saints because they have not mastered anything that looks to us like a graceful landing. And that would be sad, since of course, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing…whether we are speaking of airliners, Cranes and Geese, or saints.
Tree Swallows Swarm. Happy Sunday!
In the fall of the year the Tree Swallows mass for migration, and at major migration stop-overs, like Cape May NJ, the swarms of Swallows can take on impressive proportions. I caught one in action at Cape May Meadows Migratory Bird Sanctuary yesterday. The Swallows filled a fair patch of sky with an intricate dance of rapid flight and high speed maneuvers, and then, suddenly, they all took the notion, at exactly the same second, to settle on a single bush. The motion of the swarm was like water going down a drain. The birds coalesced and spiraled down toward the bush, settling for seconds in its branches, 500 or more of them covering the bush like a living blanket, and then just as suddenly, they would break away and spiral up, to disperse to their arial maneuvers again. They did this, not once, but at least ten times as I watched. It was impressive!
This shot is just as they decided to take to the air again: actually toward the end of the departure. The Swarm had thinned enough to see individual birds. I like it particularly because of the way the low morning light illuminates the spread wings, and because so many of the individual birds are sharply caught. It has a powerful sense of arrested motion, and as your eye travels over it, many interesting patterns emerge. I have a whole sequence of this leap to flight, and of them this shot best captures the effect of coordinated chaos.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode with -1/3rd EV exposure compensation and iContrast. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 800. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought. We have very little understanding of how the intricate, and tightly coordinated, flight maneuvers of a flock of Swallows happen. These tight spirals in particular are hard to explain. What kind of communication is required to tame the apparent chaos, and how do the birds keep from hitting each other and knocking each other out of the air?
I know that when I see the Swallows in their spiral I feel a thrill, an amazement, an awe. Later on I come to the questions about how it is possible, but while I am watching, I am simply flooded with delight. In fact, I am not sure I want to know how it happens. I have a certain intellectual curiosity about how it is possible, but that curiosity is way overwhelmed by the joy in the fact that it does…and the sense of privilege in being there to see it. I don’t actually have to know how it happens.
And, aside from the difficulty of designing any kind of experiment to determine how it happens in a scientific way, that awe is maybe why we don’t know.
There are some things, I think, that are just too wonderful to yield to analysis. Like love for instance. Or joy itself. I am certain that there is a miracle of coordinated chaos in the chemistry of the brain that mimics the spiral of the swallows, that outdoes the spiral of the swallows, when we settle into delight. And a chemical energy just as restless and irresitably amazing as our thoughts take flight once more. Some things I don’t have to understand. Some things are enough to experience. For some experiences the privilege of being there is all you need to know.
Happy Sunday!
Once upon a time in Jack London’s Redwoods. Happy Sunday!
I am in California for the Wine Country Optics Expo in Sonoma. Since the maker of the new digiscoping adapter for ZEISS lives near Sacramento, it provided an opportunity to film an instructional video. We needed a place that was relatively quiet (no interstate or heavy traffic noise…which is more of problem in the bay area than you might think…or might not…depending on whether you have spent much time there :-). We drove up through Sonoma to Jack London State Park. I had been there once years ago, and had memories of a quiet, relatively secluded spot. It worked out fine. The raw footage for the instructional video is, as they say, in the can…now we just have the editing.
Jack London State Park is, of course, the homestead of the famous writer. There are a number of historic houses and barns on the property, as well as vineyards, many huge eucalyptus trees, and groves of second growth Redwoods. It is, all in all, a lovely place to spend a day. After the videography, we took a walk up to the lake, a small pond Jack London built high on the hill above his house, mostly for bathing. The path goes through those second growth Redwoods.
You can tell they are second growth, and that the hillside was logged a century or more ago, by the many Redwood rings…stands of trees all of an age and size in a perfect circle, sometimes 20-30 feet across. The rings from around the stump of huge Redwoods when they are cut near the ground. The roots live on, and send up the ring of saplings. At Jack London State Park, these saplings have grown into tall trees, though, clearly, from the size of the rings alone, they are not a patch on the giants that grew there before the saw came.
Still, who could resist walking into the center of the largest rings, where the remnants of the stump have long turned to loam, and looking up? Who, with a camera in hand, could resist taking a few shots of the symmetrical trees rising into the sky? Not I!
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode (in-camera HDR). Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought: The scientific name of the Coastal Redwoods includes sempervirens which can be translated as evergreen, or as ever living. Seeing the huge rings of trees rising from the roots of even greater trees at Jack London State Park makes me think that the ever living translation…in the sense of eternal…is not far off the mark. The trees that were cut on that hillside had to be close to 2000 years old. The trees that are growing from the roots have at least a chance to live as long. (All that would be required is some moderation on our part, and some healing in the atmosphere. There is at least some hope for that.) That is 4000 years for a single living thing, and, compared to our brief four score and twenty, 4000 years certainly looks like forever.
The rings of Redwoods are a testament to the tenacity of life…in the larger sense of all things that live. They only increase the sense of awe I feel in the presence of these giants. They are, in fact, what gives me hope that there is hope for moderation on our part and a healing in the atmosphere. I suspect that somewhere deep inside what makes us who we are, there is a respect, a reverence for life, a will to live that will compel us, somewhere short of irreparable damage, to make sure that those Redwoods, and our decendents, have at least the chance for a another 2000 years.
I believe that we are alive with the ever living spirit of all that lives…with the same sprit that animates the Redwoods…and that it is as eternal in us as it is them. I believe that that spirit that moves us, and that life will go on.
And that is easier to believe, standing in a ring of tall Redwoods at Jack London State Park.