birds, haiga, haiku, photography

Vocal Visitor

Caw from unseen bird.
Crows are louder and shriller.
Could be a raven.

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Overlay © John Cobb | Unsplash

While my own sightings are few and long ago, I believe ravens still inhabit the region where I live and am confident that I can distinguish the croaking caw of a raven from the canonical caw of a crow.  (Don’t hike much any more; still big on alliteration.)  I also have some of indigenous folklore’s admiration of ravens, so I celebrated hearing one with a haiku.  That posed a problem.

An ordinary image of a raven would not work for my haiku about an unseen bird thought to be a raven.  I considered posting the haiku by itself, but I like images.  Hmmm.  I can photograph the nondescript view toward where the call seemed to originate.  Can I then find and tweak an image of a raven to make a ghostly overlay that fits the mood of the haiku?  Yes!

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birds, flowers, haiga, haiku, humor, photography

Ozzie Had His Head on Straight

David Eppley’s photo of a bald eagle named Ozzie was among the fan favorites in the Weather Channel’s 2016 Photo Contest.  The same excellent photo inspired a haiku that can respond to a CDHK challenge about daffodils.  Really.
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Carpe Diem #1832 Narcissus (Daffodils)

DavidEppley_EagleDrinking_840x568

© David Eppley

Mythornithology
|When we saw himself,
|Narcissus forgot to drink.
|Eagle had more sense.

daffodils-close
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.

birds, haiga, haiku, photography

Light Show

The weather is warm and will soon be hot, so I leave my camera behind when I smuggle in a quick walk between chores.  As Murphy’s Law predicts, I see something I want to photograph.  While the scene itself is common enough, the way light caroms off part of it (and then to me) is not.  Oh well, for now I can write a haiku.  Maybe later I can get an image close to what I see?
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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:

16607712 - male red-winged blackbird (agelaius phoeniceus) perched

Sometimes it takes a good deal of editing to tell the truth.

birds, photography

How to Hide in Plain Sight

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K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge:
Hiding In Plain Sight: Photo Elements You Might Have Missed!

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:

Wren-Feeding-Chicks_840x1112

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.

birds, humor

Dirty Look Thru Dirty Window

My seed feeder is hung just outside my living room window.  Please pretend that the white specks in my hasty snapshot are snowflakes, not crud on plexiglass that refuses to stay clean (but is springy enough to prevent serious injury when a bird tries to fly thru it).

hungry-chickadee_A-ME-De0_800x498

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.

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birds, haiku, humor

Warned by a Shadow

From some viewpoints, a shadow has a bright side. An example is my response to a CDHK challenge to use the word [shadow] in a haiku.

Carpe Diem Haiku Family — A New “Shadow” Challenge

hawk-shadow_800x356

Image cropped from © Ryanfaas | Dreamstime.com

Lost Lunch?
|Sunlight breaks thru clouds
|and sends hawk’s shadow downward.
|Prey darts for cover.

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birds, haiku, humor, photography, politics

Amazing Photos Out There

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While I did not take the photos shown here, I did write the haiku.
coming-storm_350x466

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.

eagle-drinking_350x266

birds, food, haiku, humor, seasons

Spring from Another Viewpoint

A few seconds near the end of the delightful music video from a CDHK episode have inspired a haiku that looks at a familiar subject from an unfamiliar viewpoint.
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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.