Daily Archives: January 8, 2017
Female Bluebird. A poem…
Female Bluebird, Roger’s Pond Park, Kennebunk Maine
A little bit of a bonus on Sunday. 🙂 Finishing up a thought from yesterday. This is the image that inspired yesterday’s Day Poem.
The female Eastern Bluebird is the more
subtle of the sexes (generally true among
birds), not so gaudy blue and rust red as
the male, and in Winter even paler, washed
by the cold to match the season. Still, if you
look closely, there is a fascination in the
way the bright blue peeks out of the plumage
on the wings and back, teases the eye, and
keeps you looking. I wonder if it has that same
effect on the males come breeding season?
Photographically it has an interesting history. I took it at maximum zoom, 600mm equivalent field of view on the Sony Rx10iii. When processing it in Polarr I really like the composition and the feather detail on the bird, but could not crop in enough without loosing too many pixels to get the bird at the scale I wanted. So I saved it, and reopened it in Big Photo, another app for the iPad. Big Photo allows you to resize images up or down, using a variation, I am assuming, of the “genuine fractals” math that produces very satisfying results when you upscale. This is cropped tighter and upscaled to 16 plus megapixels. The result is a “printable” version of the image. It, of course, has been downscaled again for blog and social media display, but I am satisfied with the results. Isn’t technology grand…when it actually works. 🙂
Beauty everywhere. Happy Sunday!
Cattails, Roger’s Pond Park, Kennebunk Maine
“if your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
I went to Roger’s Pond Park, as always, in winter, in hope of Eagles. But I went with a gererous eye, willing to see whatever was there. There were no Eagles. I found a small flock of Blue Birds, a White Breasted Nuthatch, and a Downy Woodpecker…all to the good…and then, on the way back to the car, the cattails in the little wetland between the water treatment plant and the park caught my eye. I suppose I was looking for more birds, but I ended up looking at the reeds themselves. Winter reeds, their heads disheveled and fluffy. I zoomed the camera in for a closer look and liked what I saw even more. Now the reeds were an intricate tapestry of textures, a symphony of textures. Beauty is everywhere to the generous eye…everywhere you turn, in every season.
Beauty is an aspect of creation, a reflection of the personality and the spirit of the creator. The beauty we see in nature is testimony to the beauty of the heart, the quality of the love, with which the Creator creates. It is everywhere because God is everywhere at work. And that is what the generous eye sees.
Go out today and find some beauty. Happy Sunday!