


Carpe Diem #1832 Narcissus (Daffodils)
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
Click here to see more images and read interesting facts about flowers in the genus Narcissus (AKA daffodils).
Click here to see more images from the Weather Channel’s 2016 Photo Contest.
Red-winged Blackbird
Sun shines. Bird mutters.
Perched on power line, flicks tail.
Day-Glo epaulets.
Hmmm. Buy a download of a promising large image (6750×4500 pixels):
© Steve Byland | 123RF Stock Photo
Rotate it. Crop tightly (down to 635×912). Boost saturation and visual contrast. Yes, the result is like the red and gold on black that I saw when the light was just right:
Sometimes it takes a good deal of editing to tell the truth.
Sky Circles
Riding the spring wind,
hawks with still wings and shrill cries
claim territory.
© Steve Byland | 123RF Stock Photo
A lot happens in the sky.
Hawks stake claims.
Clouds sometimes imitate clams.
The challenge illustrates a familiar way to hide in plain sight, by being a small part of a complex scene. My response illustrates another way, by being quick and unexpected. While a classic experiment using a fake gorilla provides one example, my response uses a genuine wren.
So long ago that I was using color negative film, I took a photo of a wren feeding his/her chicks. When I eventually got the print back from the lab, I saw something I had never seen before and have not seen since:
The parent’s tail feathers fan out to brace against the outside of the nest box, forming almost a half-circle. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. The shutter clicked at a lucky instant, freezing a detail of the momentary handoff that I have never seen in real time.
To get a web image, I scanned the old print and looked more closely at the scanned image while deciding how to crop it. A bird splat on the nest box was hiding in plain sight (the familiar way) and was now a distraction. No problem. Any decent photo editing software could remove it, as mine did.
Sad to say, all my instances of hiding in plain sight the familiar way are like that banished bird splat. Experiencing a scene in real time, I either do not notice or can easily ignore power lines, bright reflections, and whatever else detracts from the good stuff. Examining a photo later, I find that whatever hid (by being a small part of a complex scene) is now so distracting that I must tone it down if I cannot remove it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The invisible gorilla experiment is a classic example of hiding in plain sight by being quick and unexpected. The resulting book is a good read exploring several ways that people often overestimate their abilities.
Hey, stupid! The feeder’s empty!
When I am slow to refill the feeder, birds rummage in the tray and sometimes find a seed among the debris that has accumulated. Then they usually go elsewhere for a while.
Sometimes a chickadee (but never a bird of another species) has a different response. The chickadee sits on the edge of the tray (looking into my house) and glares at me. Corvids and parrots are not the only brainy birds.
Carpe Diem Haiku Family — A New “Shadow” Challenge
Image cropped from © Ryanfaas | Dreamstime.com
Lost Lunch?
Sunlight breaks thru clouds
and sends hawk’s shadow downward.
Prey darts for cover.
While I did not take the photos shown here, I did write the haiku.
Many amazing photos have been submitted to the Weather Channel’s It’s Amazing Out There / 2016 Photo Contest. The contest has both expert judging and voting for the “fan favorite” by anybody with a Facebook account. U can vote daily until 2016-08-26 and distribute those votes however U like. Having viewed only a few of the submissions, am I competent to recommend votes to other people? Not really, but Donald Trump has set the competence bar low enough to be cleared by a garden slug. Being a little more competent (and a lot more honest) than Trump, I will share my enthusiasms anyway, with cropped/resized versions of 2 submissions.
While I have been voting enthusiastically for Coming Storm by CJDraper (aka Dancing Echoes on WordPress), I also want to salute the fan favorite as of the last time I looked: Ozzie (a bald eagle) by Davedc. The latter already has plenty of well-deserved votes, so I wrote a haiku inspired by it.
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
I consulted the plants in my yard for my first response to
Carpe Diem Special #194
A Trip Along Memory Lane — with a twist,
but I did not consult my plants this time. They might be shocked.
Spring from Another Viewpoint
One fat little bird
welcomes spring in its own way.
Cherry buds are food.