All posts by laurahinnj

Birds, Snapshots, Wanderings

How to photograph a tern

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First find a marshy place

with a dock.
Around the dock, look for some comfortable pilings
where the bird might like to perch.
Then, on the pilings, photograph something for the tern
something beautiful and strange that will make it feel at home.
(I found a couple pelicans.)
Then wait with your camera.
Don’t speak.
Don’t move.
(Hide behind a piling if you have to.)


Sometimes a tern will come quickly
but it can just as well take hours.
Don’t be discouraged if one doesn’t come right away
wait.
Wait years if necessary
it doesn’t mean that your photo won’t be good.


When the bird comes
if it comes,
remain absolutely silent.
Wait until the bird poses for you
then quietly take frame after frame.
Move closer if you like.
Try not to cut off its tail feathers.
If you get too distracted or excited
and forget to show the best angle on the bird
or have too much pelican in the background
don’t worry.
(You can fix most anything in PhotoShop later.)


Just photograph the bird
with the prettiest splash of blue for a background
or green if that’s what you prefer
and remember to have fun.
Photograph the summer breeze, too
and the smell of the sunshine and the ruckus of the boat-tailed grackles.
Then wait for your bird to sing.
(With terns this is an optional step, of course.)
If it doesn’t sing, don’t be sad.
You did your best.


But if the bird sings,
it’s a very good sign.
(Terns seem to spend a lot of time looking at their toes when they should instead be singing.)
It helps to have a great lens when taking photos of birds.

It also helps to have a friend willing to loan you such a lens

be warned tho
you’ll want your own.
Santa
are you listening?
😉

Wanderings, Wildflowers

Too easily forgotten

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A lecture and slide presentation yesterday sponsored by SHBO on NJ’s native orchids has me reviewing photos from this place and drooling with the memory of it.

One problem with waiting forever to process photos is the forgetting of details that happens in between.

😉

I’ve all these photos of drop-dead-gorgeous flowers and can hardly remember the name of one of them!

I’m thinking this one is Ragged Fringed Orchid, as the deeply fringed petals make the flower look pretty tattered.

Am I right? Anyone know? Jim?

Bunnies

A promise kept

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Boomer, my heart-bunny
2003 – 10/28/09


In my most pragmatic moments, I think of the Dickens quote: “Life is made up of a series of meetings and partings,” and try to convince myself that this is, indeed, the way of it and that mourning and memory are the mirror-twins of joy and experience. The latter cannot exist without the former, because otherwise life would be featureless and flat; either constant valley or relentless plateau.

Each bunny brings its own heartbreak, be it with their coming or their going.

Despite his sad start, Boomer came to live an enviable life among bunnies and he lived it well, I think. He was the beloved of two beautiful Flemish-bunny girls in his lifetime and enjoyed many hours napping in the sunshine. He loved a warm bed and a soft pillow. He was easy in the way only a Flemmie can be: gentle, big-hearted, all feet and big ears.

The vacuum and the roar of a lawn mower were the only things to bring out any memory of fear in him.

“You’re safe, Boomer. You’re home.“

And that was enough, whispered time and again into those sweet velvet ears, to calm him. My secret promise; a reminder for us both.

There’s some part of me that’s in tune with bunnies; that sings in the same key with them. Others don’t get it; they might love cats or dogs or iguanas, but the love of a bunny is different, somehow. It touches some other place; a place that seeks to protect them in their peculiar frailties, as much as it delights in their boundless joy.

The love of a bunny is different.

And the heartbreak is different too, somehow.

Remembering, Snapshots, Wanderings, Whatever

Sailing wisdom

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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

-Mark Twain

Pic taken from the ferry to Cumberland Island, somewhere along the intracoastal waterway.

Any sailors among us?

😉

I had just one experience as a child in sailboat that I remember looked something like this. I didn’t fall overboard or get seasick. Considering how scared I was… both major triumphs!


Now… to have that same opportunity today…

(dreaming)
Snapshots, Wanderings

The horses of Cumberland

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I’ve been calling them wild when, in fact, the horses of Cumberland Island are feral, as their ancestry includes horses that were once domesticated.

The population is not managed in any way, includes many bachelors and is left to roam freely in the salt marshes, among the abandoned estate grounds, within the glorious interdune meadows and along the beach itself.

They seemed tame and reconciled to the presence of people and their cameras.

😉

It took all that I had in me not to reach out and stroke this foal’s sweet blaze.

“All the wild horses
tethered with tears in their eyes
may no man’s touch ever tame
may no man’s reins ever chain
and may no man’s weight ever lay freight your soul
and as for the clouds…”

There are just a handful of places to find such horses, the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague being the best known, but these are said to be longer-backed and longer-legged than those to the north.

Never mind that the setting is otherwise gorgeous and pristine.

Some conservationists concern themselves with the environmental effects of their population on a sensitive ecosystem; a population largely without predators (save the occasional gator, I guess) and one which is considered non-native, while others are more concerned with the welfare of the horses themselves. Like gypsies, they wander in family groups, constantly on the move and prone to defend whatever territory they happen to be in at the moment.

None of that much mattered to me. They were beautiful. And photogenic.

😉

Birds, Snapshots, Wanderings

Skywatch Friday: Driftwood Beach Dawn

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An hour or so at sunrise on Jekyll’s Driftwood Beach was a *must-do* for me, despite not really wanting to drag myself from bed in the pre-dawn darkness at the start of what would be a full day of kayaking and then later driving clear across the state of Georgia to start the trip home.

But I’d seen pictures and had to be there with my own camera.

😉

The dawn was disappointingly cloudy and the horizon dotted with shrimp boats… not what I’d hoped for.

I wandered among the jumbled boneyard of oaks and pines, waiting. I got lost with the fiddler crabs scuttling between the maze-like tangles of trunks and branches. I searched for perfect shells and sand dollars. I came upon a juvenile Bald Eagle, perched in a dead snag, awaiting the clear dawn’s light with me and felt privileged for its company.

Finally, the sun made its appearance above the clouds and I found that I liked it best between these silhouetted and wind bowed oaks.

Enjoy more Skywatch Friday posts here.

Small truths, Snapshots, Wanderings

Relics

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Left behind, survivors from another era, they inspire awe in me

 

and provide a foothold for my imagination

 

sweet sentiment dressed in snips and blazes and stars

 

a whimsical peek into the hubris of the past, red wattles swinging in a sultry breeze

 

admittance to some rich man’s Valhalla, its roofless ruins pointing jagged brick fingers to the sky…

 

No longer one family’s private garden, Cumberland Island is the type of place a child might dream of: a whispering forest where flowers grow giant-size and birds speak in tongues and vines are so fat they could carry you from a tree to a pony’s wild silky back.

A place where clouds seem to have fallen to the sugar-white beach in foamy bits and scrub oaks lie blown back like shrieking women.

If ever you’d dreamed of such a place, you’d not have the heart to see it ruined again.

Silenced now are the grand parties, the silk and champagne laughter. Instead there’s wild turkeys that waddle through the palmettos like a pack of tiny horses and ferns that sprout like fountains from the wet bark of primeval oaks, sudden pristine fields where cows might wander and the occasional lone palm that rises up like a warrior out of the whiteness. Suddenly, the crashing sea comes into view and the child in me is happy for dreams come true.