"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
           -Lou Holtz

At last! Up and out on the water (kinda) early today. The forecasted 30% chance of rain for us was actually a grand day with clear skies and delicious water. I loaded the kayak on top of the car and headed out to a tiny put-in I know of along Estero Bay. The tide was still on the low side of incoming - still too low for a drop into the boat from the dock. Since I sold my skiff, I've yet to design a new way of getting into the kayak at low tide.

Off I paddled! The bird count this year has been less than exciting according to all my bird friends, and a float past my usual rookery haunts confirmed this fact. Still, I found lots of smaller birds congregated on oyster bars. American oystercatchers (of course!), terns, seagulls, pelicans - and down toward Lover's Key, these cormorants were sunning in full breeding plumage.

What cool ears this guy has!  Auritus is actually a reference to the bird's ear-like crests. And corax is the latin species name for Raven. Phalacro comes from the greek for bald-headed or smooth. To be bald is to be phalacrotic.

And as long as we're dissecting names, the word "cormorant" is derived, through French, from the Latin corvus marinus, or "sea crow." A group of cormorants has many collective nouns, including "a flight of cormorants", "gulp of cormorants", " rookery of cormorants", "sunning of cormorants", and a "swim of cormorants."

Cormorant fishing on the Nagara River in Japan is a 1,300-year-old tradition where fishing masters (ushō) use Japanese Cormorants to catch fish, primarily ayu (sweetfish). Fishing masters begin each day by selecting ten to twelve healthy cormorants for the evening’s activities. When the cormorants catch the fish, they are brought back to the boat using ropes attached to their bodies. When they are back in the boat, the fishing masters remove the fish from the birds’ throats. Each bird can hold up to six fish in its throat. The birds are prevented from swallowing the fish because of a ring tied around their necks. The cormorants, however, are still able to swallow smaller fish. Though the ropes are strong, the fishing masters are able to quickly break them if a bird’s rope gets caught beneath rocks, ensuring the bird will not drown.

In North America, fishermen view cormorants much differently - as a competitor. In the United States and Canada, they are believed to be the primary reason for fish decline and roosting tree death (accumulated fecal matter below nests can kill the nest trees), and they are hunted during breeding season in their nests.

Cormorants are avid recyclers. They will sometimes revamp an old nest rather than start a new one from scratch. And when they find pieces of useful junk, like old bits of rope, net, or plastic, they will often incorporate them into their nests.

Nikon D100, Nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/320 sec, f/8, ISO 100

"I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music."
           -Billy Joel

It's been a glorious weather week dotted with blue skies, dry air, soft sea breezes and magnificantly clear, turquoise water. I have watched it all - watched kayaks floating beautifully with people other than my self in them - from high rises and homes on the beach while I worked. Torture, to some degree. My day will come, though. Soon.

Tonight, we headed to Estero Community Park for a great concert to raise money and awareness for CREW (Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed) - a wonderful jewel of green, wild land just east of here. I've spent a number of great days there in the last decade or so, hiking trails, finding wildflowers, birds and great light.

It was a perfect night. I brought along my D100 - the best tag-along camera made. The sun set just as flutist Kat Epple began playing and the stage lit up. Her music, accompanied by a group on piano, harp and drums, was amazing - but so were the bluegrass family from Buckingham. The youngest player of the night, a little kid on a huge bass joining his dad and uncles and brother while they picked and sang, belted out his own "local" version of "This Land Is Your Land" to end the night on a perfect note.

Great light, great night, great weather, great music. Tiny stars up above after the blue light was gone. Whippoorwills in the dark doing harmony with the bands.

Some nights are so rich you can barely lug the loot home.

Nikon D100, Nikkor 24-120mm VR, 0.6 sec, f/7.1, ISO 400

"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it."
           -Richard P. Feynman

It's a lazy Easter Sunday afternoon; I've put aside the ever-growning to-do list and picked up the camera to simply play. Last summer, when I participated in a 12-week The Artist's Way cluster, we learned that it was important to "refill the well". Translated, that means it's important to recharge one's creative batteries. And you gotta play to recharge.

I got the idea to try something completely new when I was reading a photography blog entitled, "What's It Take To Be Great?" A real hook of a title, and most certainly, a question I've pondered in my own pea brain often.

This particular post talked about study in the science of experience that concludes that we humans have a tendency to be lazy. We often practice hardest that which we already know and are most comfortable with, rather than strike out into new territory, harder stuff or the unknown. Greatness - rich experience - commands experimentation. Practice the hard stuff. Move outside your comfort zone. Take a chance. Be brave.

And so, with that challenge hanging in the air, mixing with the sweet, pungent aroma of good coffee, I hatched an plot - a promise to myself - to do something, ANYTHING, new with my flash unit today. It's my least used piece of equipment. I'd seen a blog about smoke photography earlier. It intrigued me, not only because it's something I haven't done before and it required a flash unit, but because I guess I have a peculiar attraction to those Rorschach ink blot test shapes and the abstract.

The setup wasn't difficult, although finding stick incense on Easter Sunday did present a momentary challenge (amazingly, Walgreen's had some rather stinky ones - strong florals). I chopped off a hunk of the black paper I use to finish the back of each framed piece I make, taped it to the kitchen cabinets, then stuck the incense in a piece of sticky silly putty (yes, I own sticky silly putty. It's almost as essential as duct tape these days!) It took a little bit of tweaking to dial in a good flash output, exposure and white balance, and a lot of experimentation in the science of pushing the smoke here and there with puffs of breath, but soon enough, I filled two cards.

Seeing them on the screen was amazing. I was immediately captivated by the reverse of what I'd always believed: our eyes see so much more than cameras can capture. Here, the camera captured what I could never see with my eyes. The screen came alive with barely opaque tendrils and fluttering waves of gossamer, puffs of smoke resembling the heads of violins, and swirls and tight curls resembling my nautilus shell and the Golden Mean.

The physics of smoke - it was amazing!

Plato called Phi - the golden mean - "The key for the physics of the cosmos". The nautilus shell is just one of the known shapes that represent the golden mean number  - or 1.6180339. The Phi is a number without a mathematical solution; the digits simply continue for eternity without repeating themselves.

The uniqueness of the golden mean is that it can be found in all living forms such as the human skeleton, the shell and the seed pattern of sunflowers, and is widely used in art, architecture and religious symbols. Artists like DaVinci and Kandinsky have used the golden mean in their paintings. The Guggenheim museum, planned by Frank Lloyd Wright, is shaped like the nautilus shell. Researchers found that humans will recognize great beauty in art, architecture and even a face that has the golden mean proportions.

I saw Phi go up in smoke today, and I'm here to confirm, it was a very beautiful thing.

Nikon D2x, Nikkor 60mm micro, 1/50, f/16, ISO 100, SB-800 @ full power, 2550K white balance

"The predicament is truly a testament to nature’s strength."
           -Bonita Daily News article, "Osprey family clings to wind-damaged nest in Bonita"

This morning's local newspaper carried a story about an osprey nest that has been established and occupied longer than most human homes in my area. I don't know how many times I've clicked the shutter to capture this very nest at the New Pass bridge, one of my favorite places to photograph. Surely, it just might be an uncountable number; I cut my early Florida bird photograph chops on various generations of ospreys in this very nest.  The photograph above is a generation of osprey in that nest nearly two years old.

A storm blew through our area over the weekend and the metal supports designed especially for this nest that hangs from the Florida Power and Light pole by the bridge crumbled in the high winds. This alone seems peculiar to me, since this very nest platform survived both Hurricanes Charley and Wilma, not to mention other less direct-hit storms during that two-year period of active hurricanes. But fail it did, and today, it hangs "precariously" --  with the nest still intact and two chicks in the nest.

What fascinates me about this story is both the strength of the nest itself (engineers: take a lesson from osprey construction!) and the strength of human concern for a family of birds in danger. One might suppose that someone could quickly come in and right the damaged supports and save the nest, but instead, this tiny platform is caught in a nest of bureaucratic twigs: one agency can't touch it until another approves it, and the approving agency can't approve it until...well, you get my drift.

The nest clings to flimsy supports, tilted at a precarious angle, while osprey chicks cling to the nest. Human volunteers watch the nest each day, ready to take action if it should fall. Agencies shuffle papers and time marches on. Adult osprey parents spend the day feeding the family and shoring up the nest. One day, very soon, these tenacious chicks will learn to fly. And not too far off in time, all this will be forgotten except for the lesson it truly is.

"The predicament is truly a testament to nature's strength."

UPDATE: Just hours after I wrote this blog entry, Florida Power & Light (FPL) crews installed beams to brace this osprey nest. This fix didn't really bring the nest back into level, but it assured that it wouldn't fall. This update is notable for a couple of reasons. First, a utility giant was able to navigate rivers of paperwork and get the job done just twenty-four hours after the story broke in the media. Second, the Bonita Daily News photographer who captured the repair work took some amazing photographs of the delicate operation, despite the crummy light from overcast skies (be sure to click the photo at this link to start the slide show). And last, not only did the chicks tolerate the repair while in the nest the whole time, but the parents flew into the nest several times during the repair to add more branches...doing their part, I guess.

I guess the predicament was not only a true testament to nature's strength, but the fix was a rare testament to the cooperation between humans and the animal world. In a place that consumes natural habitat faster than you can blink your eye, that's saying something.

Nikon D2x, Nikkor 80-400mm at 400mm, 1/50, f/8, ISO 100

"Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything."
           -Muhammad Ali

It isn't often I have an assistant on the job, but when a friend offered to come along and help me with a new photo assignment this past weekend, I didn't really have to think very hard before I accepted.

I needed help since my line of vision has grown an aquarium screensaver overlay. Floaters and flashes as big as beluga whales and lightning bolts joined the bubbling stew of failing eyesight this week, prompting an emergency visit to the eye surgeon to check for retinal detachment. I can see; I just have lions and tigers and whales floating around in a visual lightning storm.

So...my next surgery has been accelerated to the day after my next art show. In the meantime, a friend who tags along and double checks what I see for me, as well as making sure I've extinguished all the candles, turned off all the lights and put everything back where it belonged - AND that I didn't burn the house down or knock over anything extremely expensive...well, that's a pure gold friend.

And so I got the job done. And it was fun! I'm so used to dashing around these jobs by myself that I tend to work better as a loner sometimes. This night, though, it was lots of fun and an easy collaboration. As I chased lovely blue twilight inside, outside and through each room, I was thinking about how blessed I am in my life. True blue friends are blessings, indeed - treasures beyond measure.

Even I can see that.

Nikon D2x, Nikkor 12-24mm at 12mm, 1/3, f/8, ISO 200

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens."
             ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was a gorgeous day today; the kind of day Florida brags about in advertising and such. I began it with a gaggle of geezers outside Ace Hardware. It seemed we all had our own Sunday missions in mind and didn't know that the doors opened at 9 instead of 8. So there we all stood, shuffling feet and watching the clock.

Myself, I was there to gather supplies to build a bin to display my 16x20 matted, sleeved prints at shows. The wait wasn't bad. There I was, tentative blueprint and supply list in hand - and all those older gents just dying to give me their two cents...or two dollars...worth of advice! We chewed on my plans in early morning sun and 57 degree chill. And then the doors opened and I was off down aisles of PVC pipe fittings and L-brackets (to fix some of my six-foot easels that have seen alot of wear and tear from all the shows I've been doing this year).

The first prototype was ready to fill with prints in a mere three hours. Not bad. Three more with all the pieces cut are just waiting for Ace to get more T-slip joints in stock. My design uses 14 in all, and it didn't take long to buy them out. It's a good design. It looks a tad bit industrial for my tastes, though, so the next design addition will be a muslin "skirt" to hide the "schedule 40" tattoos all over it.

A friend came by to see the fruit of my labors in the late afternoon. We christened it a big success and decided to load up bikes and cameras and hit the back trails on Black Island in Lovers Key State Park. It was a great ride! Good light, perfect weather, wonderful company. I haven't been out much - or in the kayak - since my cataract surgery went south and gave me a case of blurred, double vision in my right eye - a photographer's catastrope. This past week's architectural photo shoot was my first, and it was very difficult. My next surgery (one of two) to repair the first surgery can't come soon enough.

At the end of the ride, we followed a new road down to Big Carlos Pass and discovered this new little bridge that spans a slip of water I once had to portage my kayak over at low tide years ago. It seemed strange to see the new bridge, but it had pretty enough light on it to make it into a frame or two.

Even change can be pretty, depending on how you see it.

Nikon D100, Nikkor 24-120mm at 24mm, 1/320th, f/13, ISO 200