Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

You know, I think we all question why we blog from time to time...is it worth the effort, do we really love still putting forth that effort, and does anyone really care about what we put out there?

Even though I decided a long time ago to put on my blog what I want, not what I think others want to see, and have given myself permission to only blog when I feel up to it, or I have something I think is worth putting out there for others to see, the hope is always that someone else will love it too.

It has been really freeing to accept those principles, and so when others respond to something I love, well it makes me really, really happy, but also very, very thankful!

Thankful that something I created caused a reaction in someone else, and grateful that I found this medium of photography that helps me to connect with friends, family, and even perfect strangers!

It pushes me to keep going, to push through pain, frustration, equipment limitations, and dreaded self doubt in order to make those connections and to hear your reactions...to see my art not only through my eyes, but also through yours!

Creating for the sake of creating is lovely, but creating and knowing you've touched someone, no matter what you create, well that my friends is the reward!  And I have to say that it squashes down all the other things that keep us all from being creative human beings who have the ability to make this world not only more beautiful, but so much more compassionate and connected.

So thank you, for visiting here, even when I don't post, even when I don't post house things like I once did, and walking this creative journey with me.  Thank you for inspiring me in ways you receive no credit for, in ways you aren't even aware you are motivating me, and for just looking, smiling, and hopefully going on to be more creative yourselves.

I appreciate each and every comment you left on my last post, I really never thought that a bunch of images of birds on a blog that had started out as one talking about home decor and decorating would inspire such wonderful, thoughtful, and heartwarming comments, but then I shouldn't be surprised should I?  I've been lucky to have always had wonderful readership, smart, insightful readers who give freely without expectations...but still, I am blown away, and wanted to let you know that I never take it for granted!

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

Brave

Yesterday, as we left our house to go run errands we were greeted by something unusual.  Right in the middle of the road was a young osprey, sitting on the pavement and looking a bit disoriented.  He didn't move as we slowed down, but after we stopped he hopped over to the side of the road into a ditch.

Our first thought was that he was injured, mostly because he was on the ground, and because he was holding his wings at a weird angle to his body.  We feared he might have a broken wing or wings, so we called several rescue groups who specialize in birds of prey, only to find that they were closed, so we were forced to just leave messages.

We did finally speak to one group who said that if we could get him into a box, they would take him the following morning.  We asked how we should do this without injuring ourselves or the osprey, and what to give it overnight besides water...they recommended fish, which is kind of a no brainer when it comes to osprey.

As we debated what to do, I snapped a few pictures, but I did so reluctantly and from a distance.  I felt guilty taking pictures of what could be an injured bird that may not make it, but there was a part of me (and Mr. Tide) that felt like this bird was going to be just fine.  After finding no visible signs of injury, we thought that perhaps this was just a young osprey who had been brave enough to venture from the nest, and was just getting his sea legs, or wings in this case.

As we observed him from our truck, we saw an adult osprey flying above and this made us think that perhaps he was just the first one daring enough to leave the nest.  So we formulated a plan...first we would go buy some fish, and if he was there when we returned we would gather him up in a box and tend to him overnight before taking him to the wildlife refuge.  We still weren't completely sure how we would get him in the box, or where we would keep him overnight, since even the garage would likely be too warm, but we would worry about that later.

I also told myself that if he was in fact hurt, I would erase any pictures I had taken, but in my heart I imagined his mother coming to his aide after we left and him being safely back in the nest when we returned.

A little while later we came back, with fish in hand, and we searched and searched but the little osprey was no where to be found.  Our daughter had also been by to look while we were gone and saw no signs of him.  We looked in the woods, in the ditches, and for any signs of feathers in case the unthinkable had happened while we were gone, but he was gone without a trace...just the way we had hoped he would be.

After doing more reading on the internet when we got home we found lots of pictures of young osprey looking exactly as the one we saw in the road had looked, wings at the same angle and on the ground as they attempted to master the skill of flying.  It seems we had just been in the right place at the right time to witness this little osprey's first feathered attempts at flight.

This got me thinking about bravery, and how terrifying it must be to jump from the safety of a nest some 40 feet up in the air.  And how thrilling it must be to make that jump, even if it meant having to sit on the side of a road for a little while until someone came to rescue you and help you try again.

In life we have many chances to be brave, to do something others are afraid to do, to venture out of our own nests and risk ending up in a situation that may not at first seem that wise.  But if you don't ever find that brave part of your heart and soul, you will miss the amazing things in life, like being able to tell the story of how when you took that first leap of faith you ended up in the road, with a woman and her camera staring straight at you from the window of a big metal thing.  And you will certainly never know the feeling of soaring over land and sea to find your own nest and your own supper.

Being brave doesn't mean you'll succeed in everything you try, you may have to try many times, or in different ways before you can master the things you so want in life, but a life that is safe and one where you have to wait until someone pushes you out of the nest seems so much scarier to me.

I hope you take your own brave steps towards whatever it is you fear and want to master...and just know that there will be others who will help you when you fall and need some fresh fish!

Just So You Know

Recently, a group of old friends were supposed to come to my house for dinner.  As a group, we don't see each other often, maybe once or twice a year, even though we live within a 10 mile radius of one another, but we talk more frequently and know that we would be there for one another if we ever needed something.

We've been friends since elementary school, so we are all connected, and have a shared history.  Before the dinner, slowly but surely things began to fall apart.  One friend was heading out of town and had realized she was running out of time to get everything done that she needed to, and when I texted another friend to see if she still wanted to come she said, "I'm hella busy, can we do it next month?"  The other friend had a work obligation, so she was out of the mix early on, and finally my last friend and I decided that with just the two of us we would wait and reschedule for another day.

The reason I'm telling you this story is because that's how life is sometimes, and it's ok.  None of us was upset that things fell through, because we all have demands on our time and we all know that if it didn't happen that day it would happen another time.  That's the beauty of true friends, they "get" that life gets in the way of our fun sometimes, but it's never because we don't want to be with one another.

I hear from time to time in the blog world about people being upset that others never visit them, or that emails  and comments go unanswered and they feel hurt by this.  Of  course I can understand if someone is ignoring you and you feel you have a friendship with them, and that that friendship is not reciprocated.  But often times when I don't immediately return emails or never get to answering comments, it's not because I don't want to, or that I don't really care about that person on the other side of my computer screen, sometimes it's just because life reared its ugly head and priorities shifted.

I once had a friend tell me that if I didn't send her a Christmas card the following year that she would no longer be sending me one.  I was kind of taken aback, and wondered why getting a Christmas card would mean so much more to her then me calling her from time to time throughout the year as I did.  Did a card or letter outlining all the great things supersede the "real" life conversations we had over the phone?  Apparently it did, and we haven't communicated in years.  

So, just so you know, if we are to be friends, you will have to be patient with me, and I promise I will be patient with you.  If days go by and I don't respond, it's not because I don't care, or that I don't think of you, it's because life got in the way and took me from the "wants" headlong into the "needs."  And we all know that needs are so much bossier than the wants. ;-)

Stuff

Not much new here, in fact I realized yesterday as we went out to run errands that I hadn't been down the lane for almost a full week!  That's what feeling yucky will do to you, it will turn you into a hermit...but then again, being a hermit is sometimes a good thing.

But the whole not feeling well seems to have subsided, so now who knows where I will go...look out world, here I come, well at least the grocery store anyway! ;-)

Though I've stayed put this past week, I have been wandering around my yard, and I even made some yummy zucchini bread.  And the tomatoes are coming in fast and furious, so I shared some zucchini bread and some tomatoes with my neighbor.

Along with the wildlife and quiet nature of this place, another thing I love about my home are the neighbors.  Though we come together for parties and luncheons, we also have that lovely balance of leaving one another alone...well until we have too many tomatoes, or we need a cup of sugar...so it's perfect!

The morning glories are finally blooming.  They've had so much rain this year that they haven't been as quick to bloom.  Morning glories flower best when they are stressed, such as during times of drought or high heat.  I don't mind that they haven't been as prolific this year, because their foliage is still one of my favorites and their leaves have cloaked our fence line in a truly beautiful way.

 And speaking of beautiful, the weather has taken a turn for the better and we have actually been sitting outside in the hammock and on our patio for the past few days.  It has been heavenly, and a welcome reprieve from the scorching hot days of the last several weeks.

I hope each of you are having a wonderful weekend.  I'm off to do a load of laundry...the down side of feeling better, but hey, I'll take it!  Enjoy your day!

Pretty Cool

I stayed inside most of the day, still not 100%, but not horrible either.  It was pretty boring to be honest, but I didn't want to push things since I wasn't back on my "A" game yet.

Throughout the day a group of wild turkeys was parading back and forth just outside our house, along the fence line, and at one point they were so close that I decided I couldn't stand it any longer and went out to grab some shots.

Turkeys are not dumb, and when they heard me bumbling around in the bushes trying to be "quiet," they took off and ran at top speed across the field, leaving me with mostly shots of turkeys on the run....not exactly what I was hoping for.

Not to be defeated I looked up and noticed that with an impending thunderstorm there were lots of birds taking full advantage of the thermals, and the kicked up surf for fishing.

I don't know what it is about the wind, but when it is really blowing, the osprey and eagles decide it's time to come off their perches and duke it out with one another.  I noticed a mid air dog fight taking place WAY off across the field above the tree line, so I positioned my camera and started snapping.

I realized when I do this that I will likely just get shots of black dots off in the distance, but the logical part of me never wins out and I snap away like I'm going to get a shot good enough for National Geographic...every single time!

What I didn't expect when I got back in and started downloading images was that even though these would be black specks yet again, they were pretty cool tiny black specks!  In the image above, it's not an osprey and an eagle, but 2 eagles fighting over a fish.  If you look closely you will notice that the bottom bird is turned completely upside down.  What appears to be something hanging off of him is actually one of his wings and those are his talons pointed up in the air ready to take away the other eagle's fish!

We see this kind of fighting nearly every day, but it seems to ramp up a little when the winds pick up.

Eagles are tenacious birds, and when they want something, like another eagle's fish, they don't take no for an answer!

Even though the images appear to be in black and white, they are straight out of the camera, except for cropping and adding my watermark in Photoshop.  I love how graphic they look, and the stark contrast between the birds and the cloudy skies.

In the image above you can see the fish dangling from the top eagle's talons and the other eagle in hot pursuit to get to that fish.

I imagine the conversation was going a little something like...hey gimme that fish...no it's mine...no it's MINE!

And then, as often happens, the second bird finally got a nice hit in and knocked the fish right out of the other eagle's grasp.  There it is falling as the second eagle makes his move to catch it in mid air.

He or she was determined to catch their prize and went into full on dive mode.

Because I was shooting from so far away, nearly a quarter of a mile, I wasn't even sure I was capturing anything worth keeping, and it is really hard to focus once they get down to the tree line and the contrast is diminished.  So sadly, I can't tell you if the fish was ever recovered by either eagle, or if another battle ensued.

I turned and started taking pictures of flowers...and then came inside to find I had captured this battle, once I downloaded the images.

Even though these aren't the best images in the world, I love when I get shots like this.  It reminds me of how lucky I am to live in a place where one minute I think I will get pictures of wild turkeys, the next I'm shooting tiny aerialists in the sky, and then roses back here on the ground.  Pretty darned cool!

I hope your week is off to a cool start too!

P.S.  Welcome to the world Little Prince! :)

In Focus

I have a love hate relationship with my macro lens.

I love how close I can shoot some things, though I wish the lens would allow me to focus right on top of something, which it won't. :(  And the depth of field is incredibly fickle, even with a fairly tiny aperture.

But I still find more things to like about it than things I don't like, so for now I will be content with the shots I can get and not focus on the shots I can't get.  

See the dragonfly pic above...see those tiny round things on the back end of the dragonfly...those are eggs!  And if you follow the tail up you can see a few more eggs which I assume will soon be laid.  In my perfect macro lens world I would be able to get the whole dragonfly in focus...and be really, really close...close enough to see each of those tiny little eggs!

And in my perfect macro lens world, insects would stand perfectly still and let me take as much time as I want to capture their amazing detail.

But then I wouldn't have to work hard in order to get each shot...and life would be practically perfect, and where's the fun in that?!

The dragonfly agrees.

And deep down I know it's not the camera's fault or even the fault of my macro lens, it has more to do with my weird obsession with wanting everything in perfect focus, well when I want everything to be in focus anyway.  It's a complicated emotion folks, and I don't claim to be able to explain my weirdness! :)

This week has been a mixed bag of emotions.  Today I had lunch with friends, it was wonderful to get together and it was even more special to be able to celebrate someone's 88th birthday!  Mr. Tide has been working non stop, it comes with the territory of his job, and though I know what he does is very important, sometimes I worry about the toll it takes on him.  And yesterday I got a phone call that a dear old friend had unexpectedly lost his son...his only child, and someone who was way too young to go.  My heart breaks for him and his wife, and their loss has hit me hard.

 Life is sometimes like me and my macro lens, it isn't perfect, it's sometimes hard to deal with, but when you focus on the right parts, you really are able to capture its beauty.  Hug those you love tight my friends and focus on the good things in life.  It's as close to perfection as you will ever come.  

Winging It

I am behind on any number of things, including but not limited to...

Laundry
Dusting
Work
Cleaning out my closet
Uploading pics to my website
Returning emails
Mowing my yard
Delivering birthday presents to friends
Answering questions by sweet commentors!

And the list goes on and on, but I have to say that we have way too much going on here at my house, stuff that occupies our minds and our bodies, and keeps us swimming upstream some days.

But I made a promise to myself when I came back to blogging that I would need to let things go sometimes and focus on the important stuff, even if it meant not returning every email or being as faithful to this blog as I would like.

Real life happens, and real life can't be put on hold, so that is always the priority around here now, and I'm ok with just winging it most days.

Because winging it can actually be quite beautiful!

Enjoy your week everyone!

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Unlike the poignantly moving and, at the time, controversial film by the same name as my post title which came out when I was a toddler (1967), our dinner guest, or should I say breakfast guest, is of a feathered nature.

When I stepped out onto our patio today to take the dogs out, I heard the familiar cries of one of our resident eagles.  Each morning and night they fly back and forth from their perches on the river, to their nest somewhere way up the creek from us.  I'm used to hearing them call to one another and yell at the osprey who constantly badger them, but this time the calls seemed much closer than usual.

With my camera never far away, I went back inside and put my long lens on in hopes that I might catch a glimpse of him or her in a nearby tree.  As I was scanning the trees, looking among the leaves, I happened to glance to my left towards the field and this is what I saw.

There were also two vultures, and along with the eagle, they appeared to be having a dinner party of sorts on something that must have been killed by the tractor that mowed the fields next to us yesterday.

I snapped a few shots of the eagle in the field, and then quietly tried to get a little closer, to no avail.  Before I could even get down the steps of the patio, the eagle was off and running.  I was still hundreds of feet away, but the eagle was having no part of it all, so I backed off and went back on the patio still snapping as he flew off.

In the photo above you can see him or her with a tiny bit of field grass still hanging from his mouth.  This may have actually been a female since they are the larger of the two sexes in the eagle world.

As much as I love capturing their sheer power and beauty, I don't like disrupting their daily routines.  So I kept my distance, which meant most of the rest of my photos were of eagle butts.  I have to say though, that even from a rear view, they are pretty amazing creatures!

You Learn Something New Every Day

I've seen these little guys when I have been out and about in the flower gardens, but I kind of always assumed they were in the bee, wasp, hornet family.

It turns out they are actually a form of moth known as Hummingbird Moths...who knew?!  Well some of you probably knew, but I sure didn't.

They are quite large, and are often mistaken for hummingbirds because they feed and behave much like their avian counterparts.

They use their nifty little proboscis, the long needle like thing that comes out of their mouth, to collect nectar.  It curls up, like a coiled rope or hose, when it's not drinking nectar.

I remember the word proboscis from biology and botany/zoology classes way back in college, but had shoved it from my memory until I looked up these cool creatures today.

Apparently Hummingbird Moths love clear sunny days, which it certainly is today, albeit a hot and humid one.  The image above is my favorite, because I love the whirling of his or her wings, it creates a cool effect.

So today I learned something new...that moths come in all shapes and sizes...including one that acts and looks like a hummingbird!  Nature never ceases to amaze me.

Patience

Patience has never been my strong suit, but photography has taught me to slow down...well a little anyway.  Sometimes you can't rush a photo, you just have to wait and let it present itself.  And then if you want to turn it into something special, that requires even more patience.

I can spend hours waiting for a bird to come into position (and I have the bug bites to prove it!), and hours more fiddling with that image in post processing.  In the end I have to answer to myself, translating the finished piece I see in my head into something I like on my computer screen, and ultimately onto paper or canvas.  I am often my own worst critic, but that's ok, because it pushes me to try harder, reach farther, and most decidedly, be patient.

And if photography isn't the catalyst for my new found virtue...well my computer would be the other thing which often tests my patience.  The last few days it has been having hiccups, locking up, and just generally being a pill about things.  I've had a stern talking with it though, so I'm hoping it will sit up and fly right, much like the beautiful hummingbird above! ;-)

I hope you all are having a wonderful week and that no one is trying your patience.

Oh Deer

What a crazy week last week was!  Lots of social events going on, a huge storm that blew through with lots of damage...thankfully only big branches down at my house, lots of work stuff (yard, house, and regular 'ole work), and then Father's Day with a big meal and homemade gluten free chocolate cake...yum!

Today was spent resting and feeling a little like I'd been hit by a bus, but hey, that's how life is sometimes.  I have loads of emails to return, but my laundry is all caught up, and my yard is kind of, sort of looking pretty weed free, so life is good.

I wonder if Ms. Deer, pictured above, has weeks where she feels a little harried?  I have seen her with a set of twin fawns, so I'm betting she would say yes.  I wonder what deer say when they have been going at break neck speed for a few days...probably not "oh dear," or even "oh deer," but they might! ;-)

Enjoy your week, and I hope it's a calm one!

 

Mrs. Hummingbird

Well, the rain finally let up yesterday afternoon, and the sun was happy to make a comeback...we were happy to see it back too.

I decided to step outside and do a little more hummingbird hunting with my long lens, and I was not disappointed when a beautiful female hummer decided to show up to the feeder.  I'm so glad you liked the other images, and thank you for your kind words!

Not to be forgotten, Mr. Hummingbird showed up too and even gave me a wave hello! ;-)

I think this might be a mating pair, and I don't think this is the same male as in my last post because his throat feathers were far less dramatic than those of the other male.

Just like with the bluebirds, I never tire of seeing the beautifully colored feathers of hummingbirds, and these are her true colors...no increasing the saturation necessary.  Their feathers are iridescent, luminous, and simply brilliant, it's no wonder people have tried to capture these colors for years and bring them into their homes...Mother Nature is quite the color expert!

 

And here she is...Mrs. Hummingbird...she reminds me of that quote...

"Though she be but little, she is fierce!"   ~William Shakespeare ~

Happy Sunday!