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"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

An Unmistakable Sign of Spring

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Earlier this week, I was working on some of my typical spring photographs – buds and blooms from throughout my garden – when I took a short break, went outside, and immediately felt like I was being watched. Well, I was being watched, by the nemesis whose reappearance every spring has me overplanting my pond, surrounding it with pots and wire trellises, and taking frequent headcounts of my poor carp that just want to be left to swim and eat in peace. It’s a blue heron, either the same one or certainly a relative of those that have been visiting my neighborhood – so I’ve been told – for at least a decade. “Blue heron” is surely a fine name for a big bird, but I prefer “Pond Monster” – a better reflection of our relationship.

It flew off my roof before I could get my camera out; in these shots, it’s perched on the front peak of my neighbors house.

Pond Monster 1

Click the picture for a wider version; something about those eyes…. you know you’re being evaluated as potential snack when those things turn toward you.

Pond Monster 2

This isn’t a great shot, but it’s the only one I’ve ever gotten of the bird in flight. That wingspan has to be six to eight feet, maybe more. Can you say pterodactyl? Those dangling “fingers” are a nice touch, eh?

Pond Monster 3

Happy Spring!

On The Large Hadron Collider

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I have to admit that even after reading several articles about it, I still don’t understand enough about the Large Hadron Collider to write an intelligent-sounding post. Physics, chemistry, astronomy — and anything that smacks of having even a distant relationship to math or calculus — don’t get past the internal censors in my head. I have enormous respect for people who do understand this stuff … I’m in awe of them, really … and this colossal experiment apparently has significance to these sciences that will be felt for many, many years.

So, here are a few related articles and sites that I came across yesterday:

From Computerworld:

Collider test called a ‘great milestone of mankind’ – “Today’s successful test run of a massive particle collider is being called ‘one of the great engineering milestones of mankind.’ On Wednesday morning, just outside of Geneva, scientists shot a particle beam fully around a 17-mile loop in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Twenty years after development of the collider began, a particle beam made the full journey around the accelerator for the first time. It’s a forebear to the time when scientists will accelerate two particle beams toward each other at 99.9% of the speed of light….”

Also from Popular Science:

It’s Christmas for Physicists! – “If you somehow managed to avoid seeing the comic, listening to the rap or reading anything in the all out media blitz, then let me be the first to tell you that earlier today the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most power particle accelerator, began operation. Scientists hope that the experiments conducted in the $9 billion dollar accelerator will help them discover the mysterious Higgs boson. The Higgs boson, colloquially referred to as the ‘God particle,’ is the hypothetical particle that imbues matter with mass, and finding it (or not finding it) will have profound implications on the world of physics….”

And from the Boston Globe’s consistently excellent photography blog, The Big Picture, a series of images of the collider inside and out, here:

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready.

“Snail on the Run!”

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Have you ever spent two hours on a Saturday afternoon chasing a snail around your back yard?

I thought not….

Well … I have. A few weekends ago I splurged on a new lens for my Sony A100 camera …

sony_macro_lens_thumb

… and as I was crawling around my back yard trying to figure out how to use it properly, I spotted this tiny creature resting on a dried up leaf….

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It started to move …

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… and you’d be surprised how fast a snail seems to travel at this magnification.

The focus on these shots is not great, and I’ve learned a lot more about using the lens since that first day, but I got a big kick out of how close I could get to something that was smaller than a small shirt button and still capture very good detail.

snail_on_the_run_3_thumb

The poor thing must have been camera shy, something I can certainly relate to, so I was careful not to use any flash but it tried to race off the leaf anyway …

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… yet the only way out of sight was through a whole in the leaf …

snail_on_the_run_5_thumb

… where it got stuck …

… so I set the camera aside, split the leaf to release it’s head, and off it went, disappearing into the forest…. I mean, uh, pine bark.

The lens is fantastic, definitely the best purchase I’ve made for the camera. I’ve gotten a lot better at predicting how it will react to light and focus at these close distances, so you can expect a huge quantity of photos of very small things — especially buds and bugs — to start appearing here and on my Flickr account pretty soon. I’ve also got a massive set of closeup shots from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, taken over several weekends, that impress even me — and that’s pretty hard to do….

From our friends over at YouTube, here’s Paul McCartney and Wings singing that classic, “Snail on the Run.” (It may sound like they’re saying “Band” — but they’re not.) Is the song stuck in your head yet?

Oakland Cemetery Tornado Damage Update

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The Historic Oakland Foundation now has a page up on their web site describing some of the damage to the property with a few photographs from the grounds, here:

Historic Oakland Cemetery Badly Damaged

As they state and as I discovered on Saturday, the property is currently closed for the reasons described in the article.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing and photography on this site and have ever thought about supporting it, please consider making a financial contribution to Oakland’s rebuilding efforts instead. The address for donations (also listed at the end of their article) is:

Historic Oakland Foundation
248 Oakland Avenue SE
Atlanta, GA 30312

Here are a couple of photographs I took back in November, 2007, while researching the Cemetery’s history, showing the Fickett monument:

Here’s that same monument now (photograph from the Foundation’s article):

If you’ve been following my series of articles on the Cemetery or have looked at any of my Flickr pictures of the property, you know I consider it a treasured historical and community resource unlike anything I had ever seen until I started learning about it. If you’re able to make even a small donation to helping the Cemetery’s reconstruction efforts, you’ll be honoring the memories of those who are buried there and you’ll also be recognizing the critical significance of Atlanta’s few remaining truly historical sites. Give Oakland a bit of help and I guarantee you that the next time you consider the meaning of some place of history or community that matters to you, you’ll look at it with a greater awareness and understanding of what these places really mean to our lives, our neighborhoods, and our place in this world.

I’ll be resuming my articles on the Cemetery and the neighborhood’s history within a few days….