Watching pelicans land on water. Nothing more complicated than water skiing in cold weather.
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All photos of American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos).
Watching pelicans land on solid ground isn’t quite as exciting. They’re not clumsy or awkward about it, but it involves more aerial braking and some hopping-cum-trotting that ends quickly.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
— Henry Adams
I’ve never seen a bird hesitate to speak its mind. And that even in the absence of an obvious audience. They say what they need to say, and they do so without fear or hesitation. There’s much to be learned from this habit.
Walking on the bridge to nowhere has afforded me an opportunity to view life through a unique lens, one not used by most people I know. One of the first things I noticed? Unspoken words.
Do we assume things need not be said, that those we might say them to already know what we might say and we therefore have no reason to say them? Do we think we’ll be seen as silly for saying the obvious? Do we fear the response? Do we struggle clumsily with language and think we can’t communicate what needs to be said, at least not with the depth of spirit with which it’s meant? Do we assume there will be time later to say these things?
There seems more than certain logic in this axiom: it’s better to say too much than not enough. Yet even I must admit a great deal has gone unsaid in my life, some of it now too late to say. And part of that embarrasses me for I am an advocate of people recognizing the impermanence of life and the lack of time promised. The only moment we’re guaranteed is the moment we’re in right now. That’s also the only life we can live. Anything beyond right now is nothing more than conjecture.
For you see, setting foot upon the bridge to nowhere came unbeknownst to me. I journeyed along thinking myself on the path I intended when in fact I had slowly come to be on the trail I now follow. And when I made that known to others? I discovered getting on the bridge came like a sunburn.
You lie happily in the sun turning yourself every fifteen minutes or so thinking about how gorgeous your tan will be. Meanwhile, everyone around you is thinking you’re looking awfully pink and maybe you should head into the shade for a bit. Each time they look, you’re a bit further along toward a burn, but for you you’re just toasty and in progress. Only when the damage is done are you aware of it, yet so many saw it coming all along.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not laying blame. I’m as guilty of this as the next person. What I know stems from what came after I disclosed the bridge to nowhere. “Perhaps that explains…” “We had been thinking…” “I noticed…” Each response surprised me for each came like the onlooker who after the sunburn mentions how they thought you’d been looking like a freshly boiled lobster for the last hour.
Being on the bridge to nowhere surprised me. It didn’t surprise many around me. I wish I had known what they knew. I wish someone had said something.
Yet it’s not just the question of what might have been had I known what others saw when they saw it. It’s also the question of opportunities missed.
I lost a grandmother, an aunt and an uncle in the last two years. I lost three friends just in the past two months. Each loss reminded me that I had not said what I should have said, at least not recently. Sure, each of them knew I loved them, but how long had it been since I reiterated that? Had they known my feelings in light of maturity or only from past disclosures tainted by age?
Too much goes unsaid in life. Walking on the bridge to nowhere made that very clear to me. Like the birds who speak when they need to speak no matter if anyone is listening, we humans need to recognize that it’s better to say too much than not enough.
For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
— Ingrid Bengis
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Photos:
Yesterday afternoon the high temperature reached 85°F/29°C. I spent the day in shorts and a t-shirt. Though this kind of weather does little to evoke the holiday spirit, it does bring out critters who take advantage of the warmth. And though I’m hardly in a position to meander far from home right now, I do enjoy the show this urban wildlife refuge brings right to my doorstep.
The plethora of flying and crawling arthropods shared all that sunshine with lizards and birds galore. So much activity from the denizens of warmer times, all of it happening as we speed headlong toward the end of the year. But it served to remind me of a true summer day, the air abuzz and the ground skittering. So I wandered through my photo collection to see what patio visitors I had yet to share.
Taken in early summer of 2008, on a day not too unlike yesterday, these photos show what at the time struck me as an unusual example of its kind. Sure, it’s a leaf-footed bug, but it’s not a little tank like so many of its cousins.
I first spied this unhurried creature as it lumbered along the patio fence. I gave chase, clicking away as I’m wont to do, all the while wondering about the ID of this little visitor. It sure looked like a leaf-footed bug, femoral shape looking all too familiar in that regard, yet I’d never seen one that wasn’t all dark and broody and armored-like.
At first glance I failed to find a name. I then set the images aside—always a big mistake!—and soon they became lost in the growing collection that I never get on top of. Then in early October of this year I came across them and decided I’d do a little more digging. But Ted saved me the work with his timely post on the same species. So after confirming his lead based on our differing locations, I had the name without even trying: Merocoris distinctus. I thought distinctus was quite appropriate.
As I chased the poor thing with the lens all up in its business, it meandered by a dry bit of bird poop. At that point I had to stop and laugh since it would certainly look to the outside observer that I was indeed photographing bird droppings, especially given the bug’s small size and camouflage colors against the fence.
I purchased my first digital camera in October 2003. It was a Canon PowerShot S50, a pocket-sized point-and-shoot job that had an optical zoom of 3x and could hardly focus on anything further away than the tip of my nose. I used it for years on the automatic settings because I knew nothing whatsoever about photography. Worse yet, I knew nothing about post-processing images and accepted what the camera spit out as being the final word on photo quality.
To explain how much of a novice I was, it was more than three years later when I found macro mode. It was during that same year that I began experimenting with settings in an attempt to fuel my newfound passion for photography. I still blew out the highlights on most of my photos and still had no clue how to edit an image to correct things like that, but I had begun the journey toward learning how to take reasonable pictures.
In May 2007 I visited the family farm in the Piney Woods of East Texas. Mom and I, both quite interested in photography, meandered about the grounds looking for things to photograph. (“Things to photograph” should be defined as “everything and anything.”) That’s when I took this picture:
Nothing more extravagant than littleleaf sensitive brier (a.k.a catclaw brier, sensitive vine littleleaf mimosa, native mimosa; Mimosa microphylla). It’s common around the farm. And as you can see by the image, shown here just as it was posted back then, the brightness and contrast are terrible, yet the only thing I did before posting it was crop and resize (dimensions and PPI). I wouldn’t consider it an award winner by any stretch of the imagination.
Imagine my surprise when, in October 2007, I received an e-mail which said this:
[W]e would like to purchase the use of a photograph from your website. Please let me know how to proceed and I can send you further information about our company.
I still considered the vast majority of my photographic work to be lame and nonpresentable. Only the least horrific had been posted to my blog. So what photo was I being asked about? The one above. Shock!
The opportunity turned out to be quite real, not a joke as I assumed, and the company, Adventure Publications, turned out to be quite respectable. They dropped names like Nora and Rick Bowers and Stan Tekiela. They mentioned a nature field guide due for publication in 2008. And they confirmed they did in fact want to use my photo.
Contract signed, check deposited, details worked out and photo delivered, I received my contributor’s copy in September 2008. Right there on page 96 was my photo and right there on page 428 was my photo credit. Wow! The book, Wildflowers of the Carolinas, hit store shelves just a month later in October 2008, exactly one year after they initially contacted me.
Having accomplished publication of a photograph without even trying—heck, without even knowing what I was doing with a camera—I became very excited about the possibilities and very serious about learning the trade. So a new camera was purchased by the end of 2007 and I forced myself to not only read the manual up front, but also to get out of the automatic modes and start taking responsibility for settings. Oh, and I also purchased image editing software and took the time to figure out the basics, like brightness and contrast, sharpening and noise reduction.
As for the original photo post, it will remain as it is, but the intervening years have taught me a thing or two about presentation. Knowing the camera overcompensated for dim light on a cloudy day, hence the blown out highlights and lack of contrast, I took the liberty of editing the original photo so you can see what it really looked like when I snapped the picture. With just a hair of an increase in contrast and a hair of a decrease in brightness, this is what Mom and I saw that day:
It goes without saying that I have never actively sought to license my photos. I considered this experience a fluke, albeit a pleasant one that set me on the path toward better photography. Nevertheless, since that time I have licensed more pictures for a broad range of uses, each of them discovered here on my blog without one bit of work by me.
The experience taught me about crowd-sourced materials in the age of the internet. Whereas organizations years ago could only license work from those advertising and selling their wares, the web has made it possible to not only tap into a global supply with just a few keystrokes, but it also increased competition by making the professional and the amateur compete via the same search algorithms. Now when someone hits Google to find a photo for use, say, in a textbook or on interpretive signs, there’s every reason to believe they’ll have a plethora of choices that come from people who just wanted to show their friends and family something interesting.
Ted recently talked about how he cleans up his photos in post-processing, such as removing shadows and bits of dirt. My friend Nathalie is so adept at image manipulation that she can remove whole people to leave behind the perfect child-on-horseback shot without revealing the adult who was keeping the horse in place. And my friend Warren, while referring to the background image on my Twitter profile, mentioned something about it being a nice pic considering I don’t do image manipulation.
These things got me thinking about post-processing photographs and what I do and don’t do. As I said in the comments on Ted’s post, most of my disdain for manipulating images after the fact stems from my concrete inability to do so. Sure, I can sharpen an image, remove noise, tinker with lightness and contrast, and various other primitives in the world of post-processing, but beyond the simple stuff I have to leave things alone. Why? Because I totally suck at it.
Add vignetting? Only if you want it to look like you’re in a train tunnel. Remove dust and debris from the image? Only if you want it to look like I removed dust and debris. Heck, I don’t even know how to create a mask or layer, steps necessary for more advanced manipulation techniques. And the truth is I have no interest in figuring those things out.
Why? The answer is twofold. First: There are many things I would rather be doing than learning how to “Photoshop” an image. If there are power lines in my landscape photo, then you’re going to see the power lines. Second: Ignoring that I can digitally create scenes from my photos that never existed in the real world means I have to focus more on the photography and less on creating something later. No, I’m not a professional photographer by any stretch of the imagination, yet I do think myself at least somewhat capable with a camera after spending years forcing myself to show what the lens caught just like it caught it rather than making the picture after the fact. To wit, I’d rather be outside taking pictures than sitting inside trying to fix them.
That means learning about filters, such as polarizing, neutral density, UV/haze, IR and intensifiers. It means learning about ISO and f-stops and exposure and hyperfocal distance. It means making certain that the camera does the work up front that I can’t and won’t do later. All that turns into more time doing what I love and less time sitting at a desk cleaning up messes. Because the more time I spend tinkering with an image, the more of a disaster it becomes. Heck, I can’t even make small changes to highlights, midtones & shadows or brightness & contrast without washing out the image, so trust me when I say you really don’t want to see me delving too far into post-processing.
There are religious purists who think any manipulation beyond the basics is akin to photographic heresy, an untruth perpetrated to further illicit goals of world domination through image manipulation. There are liars who create whole false scenes that never existed and present them as though they were real, showing dramatic pictures of rented animals while calling it wildlife photography. Then there are the masses who exist somewhere between those extremes. I’m counted amongst the masses with a focus on getting the picture with the camera rather than hoping I can somehow make it later.
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All photos of Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis). All post-processing consisted of cropping, noise removal, sharpening, and saturation increases. All photos taken with only a UV/haze filter.