I'm taking a long break from my writing here at the blog, to finish some creative projects. I'll be posting some of my favorite photos and photo-tunes in this spot. (Ziggy Marley, today). Thanks, my friends, for sticking around and for giving this space a little heartbeat. :) Variegated Meadowhawk on approach • Sympetrum corruptum Olympus OM-D E-M1 + Zuiko 50-200mm • 1/4000 • f4.0 • ISO 500 Dragonflies and damselflies like to return to [...]
If I had a photography motto it might be "follow the crows." As sentries of the canopy, crows know what's going on. So I pay attention. If it mattered at all to crows, they could tell me who shattered my car window last month and who stole our Christmas tree (with decorations) back in 1995. What obviously does interest crows is those pesky interlopers, especially during prime nesting season. Around here, that interloper is most often a Bald Eagle. [...]
It's like waiting for a geyser to erupt ... or an eclipse. There's a start time to this endeavor. At 6:45p, we're told, a North American beaver or two (or more) will swim into this stew of lily pads and systematically take them down for dinner. They have a lodge not far away, this family of four. It's plain good fortune on our part, taking a spontaneous walk on the shoreline trail, that we encounter a local photographer [...]
Great Blue in a single-wing stretch ... reflected in Elliott Bay like an ink blot.
... at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California I originally named this portrait "Standing Room Only." I'd never seen a Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) creep chest-high into a pool -- then just stand there forever like a Japanese snow monkey. This pose made me laugh as I watched the heron soak up the swirls of his own private day spa. One of my Facebook friends wrote, "what is this lil man doing?" That comment captured [...]
In my previous post, I mentioned a Western Gull I managed to rescue ... by true luck. Here's that story. We were in Los Angeles all of January and part of February, and in the context of a chaotic month, I stole an hour to go strolling on the beach. On my walk over through Redondo Beach, I saw two Black Phoebes (Sayornis nigricans), one who preferred automobile side mirrors as perches. She'd flutter [...]
I've done a "best of" selection at the end of previous years ... but this year I'm opting for a favorites list. I didn't realize there would be a disparity between the photos I consider my best technically versus those I hold close to my heart. There appears to be only a loose correlation between the merits of an image and my feelings about it. With that in mind, here's my list of 2013 [...]
[Continued from Proof of Life Photography - Part 1]Some of these images required a bit more than my usual standard file raw processing, due to the darkness of the conditions. Adjustments include levels, saturation, sharpness, noise reduction.We turned onto Mt. Baker Highway at Bellingham, heading for a bend in the Nooksack River in northern Washington. On clear days, the snow-tipped Mount Baker looms over the road eastward. On this day, we had just the knowledge of [...]
Moving to the Pacific Northwest changed nearly everything about my photography. When we left San Francisco, with mixed feelings for sure, I consoled myself with the idea of photographing species I'd never seen in the Bay Area -- like Bald Eagles and Orcas. I anticipated tramping along the shoreline trails of Puget Sound as I did around San Francisco Bay, finding my way in a new landscape and ecology. I envisioned the Salish Sea [...]
Albedo is the reflectivity of the earth's surface. Ice, white and bright, has a high albedo, reflecting back the sun on itself, whereas water draws the solar radiation deep into its hues. Water is always in flux, mutable -- liquid, vaporous, frozen -- evaporating, condensing and expanding. This fluidity of form and purpose fuels life with its hydrological rhythms. And, it stores life, even as deep as 4000 meters below the East Antarctic ice [...]
