For my friend Melissa I photograph frogs. For Anulfo, I am trying to track down calla lilies. And for Emily, I keep my eyes open for owls, like this little stone fella.
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Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged birds, Charles River, nature, Photography, silhouette, visual art | Leave a Comment »
A Bird came down the walk —
He did not know I saw —
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw, …
In her poem, A Bird came down the walk, Emily Dickinson doesn’t mention what species of bird she saw devouring its wee prey, but I know the bird I saw engaged in a similar act this past Sunday.
I saw him as I talked on the phone with a friend. I pace as I talk and so I wandered from window to window on the 2nd floor of the house in which I live. At some point I paused to look out into the morning as people raced by with umbrellas for the coming rains. I was about to turn away, to resume my pacing. I almost didn’t look up. How close I came to missing the hawk atop the light pole, plucking at its prey. As he ate, the people below remained unaware of his presence and seemingly never noticed the few bits of fur and bone at their feet. The bird noticed them and he noticed me, cocking his head to stare, until he finally finished his meal. An unbelievable gaze to be sure. I’ve got some video footage that I may be able to share at some point, but meanwhile, here’s the gaze of another feathered fellow. He stared me down one day along the Charles River Esplanade.
Do you believe in animal totems? Well, the hawk would certainly be one of mine!
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged animal totems, nature, Photography, red-tailed hawk, urban wildlife | Leave a Comment »
A very gray day here in the Boston area. Makes it easy to spend time creating these colorful prints. Not sure of their final presentation. Maybe print them out on watercolor paper and place in a dark wood frame? Perhaps print on silk and create a scarf or a wall hanging? All of the images are of branches reflected in water.
Posted in Branches, Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged color, Photography, reflections, trees, visual art, water | 1 Comment »
Looking for a quick Monday morning photography project, my eyes settled upon a bottle of violet liqueur. I decided to photograph a bit of the purplish liquid in a small clear glass.
The sun came out as I was setting up the shot, and suddenly reflected in the surface of the liqueur were the leaves of herbs and other plants nearby, including an African Violet. I plucked a blossom and photographed violet upon violet.
Then I decided to try my hand at changing some of the digital features.
I’ve yet to finish reviewing and processing many of the images, but so far I think the sepia ones have turned out best. 😉
Posted in Inspiration | Tagged african violet, digital, flower, Photography, reflections, sepia, violet liqueur | 1 Comment »
I used to write a lot of fantasy short stories. This fellow, whose acquaintance I made this morning, certainly inspires me to try my hand again at the genre. He reminds me of a winged Little Prince staring off into the depths of space, dreaming of home. But that’s the romantic in me.
In fact, my alien prince is a petite moth who settled upon a warm window that, unfortunately for it, grew cold in the night.
By morning when I saw it, it rested in the melting condensation.
A few photos and then with the most minimal image manipulation, my buggy friend became an errant prince embarking into the unknown.
Posted in Inspiration | Tagged image manipulation, moths, Photography, the Little Prince | 3 Comments »
When my friend R. received documents to edit, one of the first things she did was to break up the text and fiddle with margins. She explained to me that she was creating white space, i.e. giving the reader’s eyes a place to rest. This morning the concept of white space came to mind as I pondered which photo to share. An image not so busy or full of color. A difficult task, but then I remembered this photo of a rain-kissed flower.
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One night, feeling restless, I went for a walk. Along a quiet stretch of road I found a bench where I sat for a while, head bowed with thoughts. Finally, I looked up into the night sky and that is where I beheld something I’d never seen before — the full moon surrounded by a rainbow.
Soft rich reds and blues framed a large golden orb. My spirit lifted at such an unexpected sight. I wanted to share the experience so I whipped out my very first cell phone and called a new friend in my life, Steve. It was late. I certainly woke him up but he was polite and simply said, “Hello. Is something wrong?”
I replied, “No, not at all. There’s a rainbow around the moon.” I described the cool lunar light, the rich colors saturating the clouds, the magical picture painted against the sky. “How wonderful is that?”
I expected him to be as awed as I, and perhaps he was, but Steve as I was still learning at the time is a scientist who studies light. There was no exclamation of awe. He made a thoughtful “hmmmm” sound and then proceeded to explain the mechanics behind the rainbow’s appearance using clear, straightforward textbook language about angles and wavelengths and light distribution. Finally, as he grew aware of the sounds I was making, he asked, “Why are you laughing?”
“Well,” I said, “All I was trying to convey to you was the beauty of a rare sight.” With perplexity quite clear in his tone, he replied, “But so was I.”
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged art, conversation, light, rainbows, science | 2 Comments »
Posted in Inspiration | Tagged angel, glass, Photography, red rocks, visual art | 1 Comment »
Steve's Bookcase
Books are on my mind today in part because I sit in Steve’s living room surrounded by his floor to ceiling bookshelves. Handmade out of a dark wood, the shelves are asymmetric and stuffed with books, maps, correspondence and all sorts of object d’art from throughout his life. If you were to walk around that room — please try to avoid tripping over the books piled in various corners — and scan those bookshelves, you’d have a sense of who he is and the journey of his life.
The journey of one’s life is what comes across in the pages of Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, a thin lovely little book based on a series of lectures she gave at Harvard University in the 1980’s. And that is the book next to me this morning which, along with Steve’s bookcase, makes me nostalgic about the place of books in my life. The passage currently lingering with me is where Welty describes how her parents sacrificed to buy her and her brothers books. I was reminded of my own parents who did the exact same thing for my brother and I.
Of course, not every book was bought. My father worked for the sanitation department and so on trash days he would find all sorts of things that people would throw out. He always brought home the books. Some things he kept separate from us kids like the Joy of Sex which my younger brother and I did eventually discover in a bureau drawer. After we were caught my parents placed that book high on top of the refrigerator with my dad chuckling and my mother hushing him. But all other books were fair game for viewing from onion-skinned bibles to old encyclopedias and modern biographies of movie stars.
I rarely remember my father picking up any of these books though he read the daily newspaper religiously. My mother read all the time. Together they encouraged our love of books and reading and so when our elementary school sent home a book order form for the Weekly Reader Book Club, my parents found the money to allow us to order a book. We must have selected more than one but the first book that comes to mind is Gus the Friendly Ghost. It was a small purple book, about a shy ghost who makes friends with a wily mouse in an empty house. My brother had me read that book to him many nights in our early years. It was his comfort food, especially the time after having a bad dream in which he got mad at me and pulled my head off! I crawled into bed beside him as he cried and read him the book. The whole time he patted my shoulder to make sure that I was there.
Anyway … that’s me and my early morning memories of books. What first books do you remember and why? 😉
Posted in Books I Love, Inspiration | Tagged books, bookshelves, Eudora Welty, family, memories, nostalgia | Leave a Comment »
Words + Images 