Tag Archives: Camera

197. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. ~Edward O. Wilson, American Biologist

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A single swallow, it is said,
devours ten millions of insects every year.
The supplying of these insects
I take to be a signal instance of the Creator’s bounty
in providing for the lives of His creatures.
~Ambrose Bierce

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Seldom silent is a garden, not in deep darkness nor when the savage sun sits high atop the world.  In it are creatures that buzz, some that croak, others that chirp, those that squawk, and many a bird that has a pretty melody to sing.  These creatures fly, they hop, they walk, they slither, they crawl, they jump; one of them even prays as does the kind of “beastie” I found hiding in one of my roses last week.   Late in the day I’d gone out to cut away rose growth withered by summer’s siege.  As I reached in the second one to cut what I thought was a dead, brown piece of stem lying flat against a thick cane, it moved and raised its upper body.  Quite alive instead was a mantis hanging comically upside down and peering out at me.  When I realized what it was, I dashed back in the house to grab my camera.  Once back at the scene I took a few shots where it was; then I tried to get it to turn into an upright position.  Despite my repeated attempts, it only conceded a sideways turn which allowed me at least to see that one of its eyes was missing and covered with scar tissue.  Stubbornly determined however to get more compliance, I persisted in my nudging effort one more time. But boy oh boy, this guy had had enough, and it instantly raised its front legs as if preparing to attack the overzealous, annoying, and maddening pest.  So I wisely relented in my efforts, took what shots I could get, and departed.  The mantis was still holding steadfastly to that same cane when I went in at dusk, but by the next morning he had moved on to either a safer haven or one where the prey he was trying to lure with his “dead leaf” appearance was a great deal smaller and less bothersome than I.

Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face.  ~Job 23:17  ✝

164. Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. ~George Eliot

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Delicious autumn!
My very soul is wedded to it,
and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth
seeking the successive autumns.
~George Eliot

**I was hoping you could see that the morning glory below, heavy with dew after the rain, was an awesome, pink delight to behold, but the image is too smalll here for you to see its alluring sparkle.

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Northerly winds in the night blew our gray, rain-bearing clouds away, and the day dawned under a fresh, China blue sky.  Layers of dust that had been blowing in on southerly winds for weeks were washed away, sent back to the soil from whence they came.  As a result heaven’s dome along with the landscape looked sparkling clean and pristine.  In the day’s early light growing green things shined greener, new growth pushed up on rose canes, seedlings appeared in soil once parched and cracked by summer’s fiendish assaults.   Wildlife, though always smaller in number in October, flew, crawled, and buzzed with renewed energy and enthusiasm in the aftermath of the recent slow, soaking rains.  And so with a bit of an almost frosty nip in the air, this day evolved into our first quintessential, autumn day.  How, then, on such a day, could the early call to venture out in the yard, camera in hand, have been ignored?  Or how could it have been a surprise that the vignettes I found were so exquisite that all I could muster, with eyes blurred by joyful tears, was praise for the Holy One whose presence amidst the glory was sweetly palpable?

Let them give thanks to the Lord for His unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind.  Let them sacrifice thank offerings and tell of his works with songs of joy.  ~Psalm 107:21-22  ✝

16. The trees reflected in the river– they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

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A Ming vase can be well-designed
and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone.
I don’t think this can be true for photography.
Unless there’s is something a little
incomplete and a little strange,
it will simply look like a copy of something pretty.
~John Loengard

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The annual beauty in a garden once spent is gone forever, except in memory, if not captured in some way.  A camera is one of the ways we who love nature’s fleeting glory take it captive.  Unlike Loengard, I believe photos can be more than just an uninteresting copy of a beautiful thing.  For example part of what you see in the photograph above started out as that of a single rose.  However, as an experiment with some computer technology, I turned the image into something “a little strange,” as Leongard suggests, and it added another level of interest.  If one looks carefully at the altered image, fragmented pieces of what used to be negative spaces in the original photograph now have merged into engaging patterns, and so what can be seen raises questions about how much one really sees.  “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see,” claimed documentary photographer and photojournalist, Dorothea Lange. So it is that Hawthorne’s idea could be applied to my rose or his trees or to the reflection of anything, and it would speak a profound truth. We often don’t see what is right under our proverbial noses.  The eternal underlies everything mankind sees, tastes, hears, touches, and smells, so much so that all things seem to quiver from the Divine energy emitted from them.  But it’s only when the Lord’s demure presence is acknowledged that it becomes more and more keenly perceptible.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.  ~2 Corinthians 4:18   ✝