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. [...]
"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not."~ Artist Georgia O'Keeffe Gulls are among the birds I call "gateway birds." They're common and accessible. They [...]
This was a serendipitous capture ... getting the two honey bees in a straight line, and in the same plane of focus. I was photographing a single, pollen-soaked bee when the other entered the frame and queued up behind. Whenever I see bees on a slow approach to sunflowers, I can't help but think of mother ships and gravitational pull. I shot the bee photo in one of Seattle's vibrant P-Patches, tucked below [...]
My affection for wildlife in urban and industrial settings brings me the subject of steam. There are obviously a lot of distracting elements in urban photography. Although I lean toward a photojournalistic style of realism when I encounter them, I also find it challenging to show the grit of these scenes while retaining some aesthetic and balance in the shot. That's when I'm shooting wider, contextual shots. For closeups, even in the city grind, I [...]
I have a few terabytes of backlogged photos I've never posted -- many of which should probably stay archived. But, I thought for sure I'd published this one. When I searched my blog archives, it appears this image never touched the pages of The Quark. This is a banner I created last year of a Belted Kingfisher in flight (Ceryle alcyon). I shot these frames off Elliott Bay in Seattle, and layered them in Photoshop [...]
Double-crested Cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus) in Seattle, Washington. Okay, I'm pretty careful when I'm photographing around roosts. And, cormorants give you plenty of warning with all of the guano splatters below their perches. In fact, I can't think of the last time I got hit by a big bird ... so, it's funny that on the same day I photographed this display, my camera and I got a nice spray from a different cormorant -- filtered, [...]
... sailing over a cardboard sea. The sun came out and I raced down to the locks where, just a few days before, I'd seen the most perfect light on alighting herons. There's a rookery that spans a ravine, the northern terminus of which is at the Ballard Locks. Several Great Blue Heron couples (Ardea herodias) took up residence there last month, as they do each year ... above the roar of the spillway, the [...]
In 1905, the Duwamish native Cheshiahud told The Seattle Times that he could no longer catch trout in Lake Union because “too much house now -- they all gone.” 1. Seattle's city-central lake was then known to the Duwamish as meman harsh, or "little lake," surrounded by marshes and streams that fed both the lake and the Duwamish people. European settlers named it Lake Union, on the promise that it would be the unifying body [...]
American Coots creep out of lakes like creatures of the bog, drawing up mud with their lobed toes as they march, single file, from the water to their feeding grounds. I once watched hundreds emerge, one by one, from the low-tide flats at San Leandro Marina in California, forming a line of black baubles from the shoreline to the golf green where they stopped to feed. Almost as suddenly as they appeared, they marched back [...]
As my life in California drifts farther behind me, I'm given to fits of sentimentality ... especially for the wildlife and wilderness we left behind. Among my emotional favorites are the wild parrots of San Francisco -- actually, Red-masked Parakeets or Cherry-headed Conures. These are the celebrity birds featured in Mark Bittner's The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I always loved the parrots. But I grew genuinely attached to them after intercepting some would-be parrot [...]
