A friend of mine sent me this card:
It fits my hours and days and weeks sooooo well!
The card is from Susan Mrosek’s wonderful Pondering Pool collection (https://www.ponderingpool.com), a selection of giclees, cards, posters, inspirational images and thoughts, and creative writings.
Buy someone a card!
Write something clever on the inside, put their address on the envelope, and mail it!
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.
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.
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?
Happy Spring!
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 …
… 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….
It started to move …
… 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.
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 …
… yet the only way out of sight was through a whole in the leaf …
… 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?
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….
