It is Lady Slipper season once more. Every May the Lady Slippers in our local woods bloom. They are predictable. I know where they grow and, within a week or so, when they bloom. I begin looking for them on Mother’s Day, though they often don’t bloom until the last week in May. I was expecting them early this year, as most everything has been, due to our mild winter and early warm weather, but they are right on schedule. The first of them are only just now open at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters, on the sunny bank facing the river where they often bloom first. There are others, in less favored spots, that don’t look likely to bloom for a week or more yet. That means those in the woods by our home, two miles inland from Rachel Carson, where the spring is always a bit delayed, will probably not be blooming until well into June.

I photograph them every spring, often the same plants, spring after spring. I can’t help myself. It would not be May without a few shots of these stunning, brief, flowers.

The images change subtly year to year. Some years, for some unknown reason, the flowers will all be on the pale side, some years a much deeper pink. Some years, for equally mysterious reasons, I only get to see them on cloudy days.

And, of course, my equipment changes, year to year. The sensor technology in the small super-zoom Point and Shoot cameras that I choose to use has developed rapidly over the past few years, and the particular camera I have in hand in May certainly influences my Lady Slipper shots. Last year’s shots, for instance, were a bit flat (lacking in subtle variations in the pink hues) and not quite the right pink at that…and my disappointment was a factor in my decision to retire that Nikon camera early when a (possibly) more promising Canon model came out. The Canon has lived up to its promise. This year’s shots use an unconventional combination of features of my Canon SX40HS (one almost certainly not foreseen by the maker)…and are, I think, among the best Lady Slipper shots I have ever captured.

And then too, my processing software continues to evolve. We are on Lightroom 4 now…it was Lightroom 3.5 last May. In Lr4, the “clarity” (local contrast) function has been refined and improved. That contributes, along with the better sensor, and the unconventional camera settings, to the kind of “hyper-real” look of these shots. Improved technology and software allow me to capture what I like best about the Lady Slipper…which is the way sunlight interacts with the bladder, and with the fine hairs that cover the whole plant. I like this year’s shots, taken in early morning light, a lot.

I can not honestly say that I am a better photographer this year than last. While I am always learning, and finding new ways and new tools, new tricks, to produce better images, the visual engine that is behind my eye, maybe buried as deep as my heart and soul, and maybe even a physical manifestation of my spirit, which is by nature and by grace, twice over, one with the wonderful creative spirit that all in all…that changes much more slowly. In may ways it is still the same engine that made the world wonderful when I was a child. It is more refined now, more reflective, with a higher measure of respect, and a deeper knowledge of just how blessed I am each day, and have been all these years…but it is still, essentially, the eye that saw my very first Lady Slipper so many years ago. It is the same eye that found my first camera so useful, so much fun, such a great way of putting a bit of frame around what I saw and saying “look at that!” I don’t know why I have able to keep the wonder alive. I know I am no more deserving than the next. I truly hope that that there are none who have not, in some secret center of themselves, been able to hold the wonder all life long. I hope to never lose it. And to that end, I use it. Every day. Every spring. Every season of the slipper.

And I will continue as long as I am able…out in the world with my little frame…and here, and elsewhere, everywhere, saying “look at that!” I owe it to my creator. And I it is a debt I pay with joy. (Oh, how true that is in every sense you can make of the statement!)

It is the season of the slippers once again. Look at that! Feel the wonder. Feel the joy. Know you are blessed. Give thanks.