Bird Paparazzi

Thank you to everyone who helped offer words of advice/support/suggestions/etc... in my quest to narrow down my entry to the Audubon Society's bird photo contest :)  Having multiple sets of fresh eyes on my work helped me a great deal in shaving my selection down to the maximum 10 entries.

...then I found a most friendly and relatively fearless Pileated Woodpecker frequenting my feeders and I kept on my obsessive shooting ways, which added a few new photos to the mix.

In the end, after a great deal of consideration, re-editing, and mulling things over, here are the 10 shots I decided to submit to the Audubon Society:

Barred Owl (A sentimental favorite of mine)

Bittern's Lunch (Of the entire series, my favorite due to the fantastic view of the frog)

Heron in Flight (This shot goes to show how much you can change the mood of an image with a little cropping)

Dancing Crow (I truly think crows are overlooked as being so common, but they are such amazingly clever creatures, they are a joy to watch) 

Baby Juncos (Can't. Resist. Cute. Fluffy.) 

Vacationing (Juvenile Yellow Crowned Night Heron - I love his piercing red eye) 

Pileated Photobomb - (The angle of this shot will forever crack me up - "whatcha doin?  Oh, is that a camrea?") 

Keeping a Watchful Eye (Woody - the male - watches across the yard while Wilma - the female - grooms her feathers) 

Curious Pileated (This is Jr.  He would often pause from eating to watch me and my camera lens, then go back to eating) 

Mother's Nest - (Red billed streamertail female on her nest in the gardens of a resort in Jamaica.  The nest is completely out in the open in a high traffic part of the garden, yet tough to see if she is not sitting on it - I was actually standing on the walking path outside the hotel's kitchen... that brown wall in the background is the door to the office.)

This project has helped me to realize just how many bird photos I've managed to collect over the years... I am now contemplating making my 2013 calendar entirely out of bird photos.  Hell, I could probably make an entire calendar just on pileated shots!

Long Overdue...

I know I am long overdue for an update, and sometime in the next month I'll be able to explain away my absence... (some of it has to do with intermittent lack of internet access over the last week - that issue has been resolved for now!)

But for the time being... I can at least make an announcement and share a pretty picture. :)

Last spring I entered Island Magazine's photo contest (theme: depict island life)  I poured over my collection of images, studied previous year's winners, poured over my collection again... and submitted my most favorite group of photos which I felt showed Island life as I see it.  A few months later, I received word that one of my images made honorable mention in the contest!  Then two days later I received paperwork telling me not to announce it anywhere until the magazine posted *all* the winners... hence the extreme delay in finally sharing!

My Honorable Mention Photo:

This photo was taken at the end of the dock of the Pelican Bar, which resides 2 miles off the southern coast of Jamaica, just outside of Treasure Beach.  The bar itself is made entirely of driftwood, and is built on a sand bar seemingly in the middle of the ocean.  In reality, the area just around the bar is only about 3 feet deep, which is perfect for snorkeling (however one must travel by canoe from the shore over the deeper part of the bay to reach the sand bar) The dock stretches out the back door of the bar, and is a great place to lay out in the sun and enjoy a beer after a bit of snorkeling.  This is taken from the end of the dock, looking back to the shore where we'd boated over from.  I didn't paint the heart on the drift wood, that was there already :)  Many people who come to the Pelican Bar carve their name on a piece of wood or leave behind some memorabilia, making the interior of the bar an eclectic guest book.

For reference, here is another shot I took that day, standing in the same spot... I simply turned around to look back up the dock.  This was a rare moment between boatloads of tourists, when the dock was empty and you can just see our friend Tyrone inside the door eating lunch.

The Islands Magazine competition was stiff, and I'm honored to be named along with so many other great images.  You can see see all the great honorable mentions and winners on Island Magazine's Photo Page.  (I'm also excited to see they use a portion of my image for their front page collage!)

Bird is the Word

I think my lack of posting for 2 months has probably eliminated what little audience I had left here... but I'm resurrecting and pressing on anyway.

(Does that make this a zombie blog?)

Audubon Society has a bird photography contest going on... the deadline is end of August so I have some time to prepare.  When I saw that we could enter up to 10 photos I wondered if I would have enough decent images to complete a whole entry.  Then I dug through my backlog of photo files and realized just how often my lens' attention is turned to birds.

After reading carefully through the rules (no "captive" photos allowed - meaning, no zoo shots) and cutting out any shots that included bird feeders (technically those are not "captive" shots, but they don't exactly look wild either) I have narrowed my selections down to the low-low number of...

52.

Editing down any further has been a harder process than I'd imagined.  Many of the shots are exciting to me simply because of my own interest of particular species, but that doesn't mean the shot themselves are spectacular.  Some are shots I find somewhat boring because they were shot in my back yard, yet others really like them for the framing and subject.  Some of the shots are the same image cropped differently, some are the same subject from different angles, and I can't decide which I like better.  

So I have collected the 52 images into an album online... and I welcome any thoughts, critiques, ideas, insight, lists of favorites or any other comments anyone might have to help me narrow this down to the top 10 images.

All Tangled Up

A couple weeks back I followed a post by NPR linking to a fantastic mathematics doodling video.  (I vote that all her math doodle videos are must-see, but my favorite is the one about circles and snakes... probably mostly because it is rich with puns)
Those videos reminded me of the Zentangle books.  Technically I picked these books up for G last year, thinking she would enjoy the step-by-step doodling instructions.  Though she looked through them at first, they eventually made their way into her collection of "how to draw" books...
...until a couple weeks ago, when I stole them.

Zentangle is a fantastically wonderful way to learn doodle patterns - one movement at a time - until they combine to form larger abstract work.  The idea is to go at it free-form... no set plan, no "over thinking" your design.  In other words... pick up the pen and just keep swimming.  It takes the frustration of a "perfect end product" out of the equation, and instead focuses on the joy of the process.

Given how oppressive my month of April has been, this is precisely what I needed.

I grabbed a small drawing pad out of my stash of paper, a retractable Sharpie, and began.

Sometimes I would doodle in between difficult work tasks.  Sometimes I doodled while watching TV.  There were nights were sleep evaded me, and I sat up to finish a pattern or two.  I started bringing the pad with me when we went out, and I would scribble away while waiting for food at the restaurant.  I googled "zentangle" and found a world of patterns and instructions in both video form and written... which opens up the world of exploration immensely.

My very first attempt turned into a Birthday card, which I mailed out without having scanned it... my next three attempts are here:

D looked over my shoulder at my doodling one night, then drove us over to the art store to buy me a set of "real" pens (of varying sizes for greater shading options)  

What I love the most about this is just how soothing it is, to lay out repetitive patterns and add smaller details without worrying about perfection in the end result.  It is a series of smaller projects requiring hardly any supplies, it is easily portable, and can be incorporated into just about all of my other creative hobbies. I'm now working on what will probably eventually be a dimensional project, though I'm not setting my sights too strictly on the end destination.

I'm just going to enjoy the journey.

Eggless Easter Eggs of the Felted Sort

This year's experiment in egg decorating was inspired by my friend H's post about some beautiful wool rovings.... I've always wanted to try needle felting (and frankly needed an excuse to by a box of pretty pretty colors) so I did a little searching around and found out that needle felting eggs is really quite simple.

Get a styrofoam egg.

Wrap it in some wool roving.

Get a felting needle and stab the bajeezus out of it until it sticks.

This is not only a great opportunity to experiment with pretty colors, patterns and pictures, but it is one heck of a stress reliever.  G always enjoys new craft opportunities and jumped right in, however I was pleasantly surprised when also D picked up a needle and worked his creative magic.  Together we felted over a dozen colorful Easter Eggs... so much fun!