Frequent Visitors

 

The northern cardinal, a bird that presents itself strikingly against northern snow,

makes a welcome splash of color in the Southwest against a grey and brown backdrop.

The curve-billed thrasher, dull in color,

is equally welcome (despite his grumpy look),

because he sings almost as beautifully 

as the mockingbird.

I must have been a horse in a past life

 

Because nothing is so pleasing to my eye or attractive to my sense of smell than grass -- well, unless it's horses!

Who Is That Ghost Dog?

 

In HDR mode, three exposures are taken in rapid succession and then stacked to make one densely saturated image. In the shot above, Sunny Juliet was trotting along so quickly that her image looks to me like (except for the missing tail) the ghost of old Nikki. Below is SJ looking more like herself. 

Morning dew looks so otherworldly, ethereal. Leaves that have lost their chlorophyll, on the other hand, will not be as rare in a few weeks as they still are this morning.

Apples, Jiggles, and More

 

Almost all the photos in this post were shot in HDR Art Bold mode. I wanted to do two things: (1) catch the last sunlight coming over the hill from the west and also (2) see if I could intentionally produce the jiggle that everyone liked so much in my Queen Anne's-lace photograph. The apples are on these two trees:

I had a happy accidental discovery. It wasn't easy to jiggle intentionally and get exactly the effect I wanted (either I jiggled the camera too much or not enough), but Tuesday was a very windy evening, so patiently waiting for a strong gust of wind to do the jiggling work paid off, in my opinion, though the effect is subtle. Look to leaf edges.... Okay, I need to keep experimenting with this.

I decided to try letting the wind blow my little grey-headed coneflowers for the camera. First (below), are the flowers in their full height, without the wind. After that are a couple windy shots taken closer in. 

(Not HDR)

Below is garden phlox --

There are no jiggles in. my photographs of the orange chair. The wind wasn't strong enough, and my attempts at intentional jiggling did not come off. But the color in HDR mode still pops, especially in that low, early evening light.

And I'm throwing in this photo of Sunny Juliet just because ... she's so cute!

It isn't always easy to get a desired camera effect, but I will keep working with these ideas and see if I can make progress.

Are We "Dynamic" Yet?

 

This scene, Grand Traverse Bay on a rainy morning, wasn't loaded with color, but I tried the HDR shooting mode, anyway, to see what it would capture, and I liked the result. HDR stands for "high dynamic range." The camera takes three consecutive shots, with different exposures, in quick succession and combines them. You can read more about HDR here. 

I had shot my meadow the day before in HDR, and this was the result:

What do you think?

While Looking For Something Else

I ran across this photograph of a cardinal, taken in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, on a day when the sun had not yet dispersed all the morning fog.

Fields in Snow with Cable

These fields of corn, with sunflowers in the foreground and a tree-covered hill as backdrop, have been particularly beautiful since our recent (unexpectedly early) snow.

The challenge to photographing these fields is a heavy power cable that interrupts the scene.

This is a situation where I miss Photoshop and vow to return to it. Because to my eye the full effect of the sweep of sunflowers depends on the background trees.

Look Familiar?

While others were looking at and into the hole, I was admiring the shadows on the sidewalk.

A Little of What We Saw in Kansas

We crossed Kansas on the diagonal, from SW to NE, and did it in a single day. That wouldn't be a big deal to many people, but for us it was really making tracks, because we are, in general, pretty pokey travelers. We don't, generally, put in 10-12 hour driving days, and we do a lot of stopping and poking around. In general, that is. Not this time. This time we stuck to business (covering the distance) much more than we usually do, and so most of the photographs I have were taken out the car window -- that is, when it wasn't my turn at the wheel.

The Frida Kahlo cross above was a gift made by our Santa Fe friend. As I looked out the windshield, the brightly wrapped cross and Frida's face lent another dimension to the landscape beyond. We saw many, many long trains.

We saw many instances of the wind being put to work, also, along with inventive ways merchants had to catch the eye of potential customers speeding by.

With my family's railroading background, I can never pass an old train station without pausing -- and mourning the many routes no longer carrying passengers. If it could talk, the old station at Great Bend would no doubt have many stories to tell. And if only the distance a dog is allowed to travel on Amtrak were not limited, we might be crossing the country in leisurely fashion, in old-fashioned style! Freight trains, however, are still going strong west of the Mississippi and Missouri, and all the grain elevators give some idea why this would be so.

We took a short detour off our main road to explore Alma, Kansas, which bills itself as the "city of native stone." Old downtown buildings, as well as some of the older, larger houses, are built of limestone block, very familiar to me from the Illinois town where I grew up. Quite attractive, I always think. Sort of like 19th-century American castles. Sadly, our tour of Alma went by too fast for me to photograph the gorgeous old limestone buildings. 

We did make one stop to get out of the car in Alma, though. See below! My first thought when I saw it was gypsy wagon! David initially thought, houseboat! My second guess, caboose, is the one we finally agreed was most accurate. You can see how a couple of dreamers' eyes would be caught by this old derelict object, can't you?

Sometimes simply stopping for gas, though, was enough reason to employ my camera. I would have liked to see green and yellow in the lineup of semis below, but the billboard to the left (read the bottom part) convinced me to snap to shot, even without the full truck rainbow.

Not exactly photographs the state tourist bureau or any town chamber of commerce would leap to publish, are they? 

I have to tell you that there is a completely different album of photographs in my mind, from New Mexico and through corners of Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and across Kansas and Missouri. One electrifying and unforgettable image I can't show you is of an overturned long-distance hauler that had caught fire -- either before or after it rolled; who knows? -- its blackened hulk lying on the shoulder of the highway, trailer cracked open about midway and spilling piles of green cabbages out onto the side of the road. I'll bet you've never seen that photo anywhere! I can see it right now, in memory. 

The last time we went through Atchison, Kansas, we saw a gorgeous sunset, and that's still what I see in my memory album of the town. The only photos I have to show of Atchison are much more pedestrian, taken under a cloudy, end-of-day sky. 

To paraphrase what a friend says of the piano she plays in the corner of her mind (as contrasted to the one in the corner of the room), if only you could see my mental photograph album of our cross-country trip! I can't help imagining future visits (with camera and tripod and all manner of great lenses and all the time in the world) to all the places I didn't get to photograph, but it's unlikely that will ever happen. All those future visits, like the photographs that didn't get taken, are more mental objects than any part of the public world. As it is, however, I like to think that the images I do have to share of Kansas are not ones you have seen a million times before. If you like any of them at all, which is your favorite? 

Take-Off!

This is not the best image of a hooded oriole in terms of showing identifying marks, but I was very happy to catch the bird in flight.

Discovering Jewels in the High Desert

Handicapped early in life by nearsightedness and youthful impatience, I was never any kind of serious birder. Wildflowers hold still, allowing me as long as I need to gaze and consult a field guide, plants are more my speed than darting, swooping, here-then-gone-in-an-instant feathered things. 

But the birding obsession comes on with advancing years, I’ve noticed. That is, I noticed it first in other people and now find myself succumbing in turn. Bird-watching, I guess, is kind of like bridge or golf that way (though I’m still holding the game and sport at bay, thank you): a pastime that seemed deadly boring for decades suddenly becoming all-absorbing. Nowadays, though not yet a maniac, whenever I can add a new species to the list of birds I’ve managed to identify, my “discovery” fills me with a little thrill of excitement. 

Recently a little grey bird perched on a bare branch in the dry wash stopped me on my way to the mailbox and captivated me with a repeated tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet-bzzz. What was that bird? I posed the question to friends on Facebook, since I had no photo to compare to pictures in books and had only the remembered sound to associate with a “little grey bird.” Several people made suggestions, and by following up on one of them in particular I was able to find the black-tailed gnatcatcher online and listen to its song. That was it! My field guides could then fill in the details.

No telephoto lens: big handicap this year. Handicap I’ve been feeling for weeks and weeks — until I dug my camera carrying case out of the cupboard to retrieve the macro lens, thinking it would help with photographing tiny, tiny flowers. Lo and behold! It is a tele-macro lens! Perfect for the birds!

Small birds seem almost designed to chase away blues and cares. How on earth do hummingbirds survive? And with such élan? It’s inspiring.

Pyrrhuloxia

The pyrrhuloxia, Arizona’s silver cardinal, has a call so much like the northern cardinal, familiar to me from Illinois and Michigan, that here in Arizona I have to look twice to see which cardinal is visiting. I learned about the pyrrhuloxia in 2015, but only this week have I been able to see (through the magic of the tele-macro lens) and thus identify the colorful little house finch and the ladder-back woodpecker. House finch, I think, should have a more exciting name, as a friend said to me years ago about the name of the state of Idaho, which probably made her think of potatoes. House finch makes me think of house sparrow, and — sorry! house sparrows, albeit cute in their way, are not exciting to me, for I’ve seen them all my life. Now the little ladder-back woodpecker — he is just plain cute, so much smaller than woodpeckers more familiar to me, with his little head ruffled up in the breeze.

House finch

Ladder-back woodpecker

Other birds without brilliant colors make me smile, though. The canyon towhee, for example, is not a bird of vivid hues but makes up for drab coloration with personality — friendly, companionable, perky, and confident. The “most confiding” towhee, as one of my guides calls it, seems to invite something like friendship.

Canyon towhee

Then there is the mockingbird. Simple Puritan grey with white accents, it is an elegant, self-assured bird and the star vocalist among my avian acquaintance.

Mockingbird poised

Though the little black-throated sparrow, dressed in black, grey, and white, also has a beautiful morning song.

Black-throated sparrow

The black-throated sparrow, I may note here, is “Arizona’s most widespread and numerous breeding sparrow,” according to Birds of Southeastern Arizona, by Richard Cachor Taylor. And that’s all right. The description reassured me, the first time I found it, that I’m on the right track, too. It’s tempting for amateur naturalists to want to “discover” some rare species, but odds are that what we’re seeing most of the time is what is most common, and becoming familiar with as many of the common birds in an area as possible will make the less common stand out to the amateur eye as it gradually acquires knowledge.

I might as well throw the tiny flowers in here. My quest started with rattlesnake weed, so easily overlooked, so small in the vastness that you could walk all over it for years without seeing it, but once it catches your eye you see it everywhere, at least around Dos Cabezas.

Rattlesnake weed

 Going back for camera and newly rediscovered lens and returning to photograph the rattlesnake weed, I found other tiny flowers I’d never seen before. (I've used a dime for indication of size.) I’ll have to go out again with that plant identification app on my phone can help me with these, because none of my wildflower guides seems to include them, probably guessing that no one would be noticing anything of that scale. 

I brought the sprig of tiny white flowers back to the cabin to photograph them but was quickly distracted by a hooded oriole, the flashiest of birds visiting my feeders. If only he would be more accommodating about posing for me! But the oriole is not as “confiding” as the towhee or as self-assured as the mockingbird, and at the slightest rustle on my part, he is gone. I no longer suffer from youthful impatience, however; I’ll bide my time, and the oriole will return. Isn’t he worth waiting for?

Hooded oriole