I hope people like hummingbird photos. Like I said, a) feeders hanging just outside the windows, b) Pentax K-x at the ready, and c) use that telephoto lens! There will be a ton of these before long. Also, believe it or not, I only just started shooting in RAW mode. For years I’ve never bothered. Well, that was silly. In just a few minutes, I figured out how to tweak this sucker much more easily than I would normally do with a high-quality JPEG. Big duh, huh. Anyway, I’m clued in now.
And by the way, there’s a nice hummingbird photo of mine (“Hummingbird Soul”) available at Redbubble as a T-shirt, fine art print, tote bag, pillow, greeting cards, and iPhone cases, of all things. (Those and more at the Store link above.)
Spring is an exciting time for birdwatching at 7,000 feet in the southern Rockies due to the many migrating species that pass through here each year. This little guy, the lazuli bunting, is one of my favorites. I think the males (like this one) will show brighter and more saturated colors a little later in the season, but this first one ain’t bad. I usually get my best shots from inside the house with a telephoto lens. The feeding stations and feeders are all located just outside the windows, which makes it easier. The Pentax K-x sits on the coffee table, ready to grab.
On the way to where I took this photo on September 13, 2008, well before the going got rough, he showed me and the others where he’d once dynamited a roadside cliff for gold. You could do that then, before the troubles—buy TNT and blasting caps at the hardware store, go out and seek your fortune. This wasn’t very long ago. What must it have felt like, crashing through the mountains in a beat-up 4WD with a box full of dynamite and a .44 revolver on your hip like he had when he showed us? (We’d be visiting a cave and he had to check for bears and mountain lions.) Damned alive, I say, and happy.
That same day we stopped beside a cliff on a steep rocky mountain, high above an abandoned gold mine where there were giant crystals. We couldn’t get there without ropes and climbing gear, but of course I heard the tale. He’d found one the size of a man and winched it out where we were standing—it took a whole two days! There were also bears. This is not a place you’d want to end up mauled or injured, but he made it out and later sold the crystal for a hefty price. There was more about the cave where the largest crystals were, important business I’ve forgotten about energy and light and pictures in his head, all this at the bottom of a cliff where no one else might ever go.
May 4, 1970, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, U.S.A.
Dear Lord, I almost forgot! The date, that is—the events, never. Watching this, my eyes filled with tears, after all this time. In the context of what’s shown in this video, the preceding post might make more sense to some. This is what it was all about. If you don’t get this, you don’t get anything. But the history is mostly “vanished” now. Back then it was a terrible shock that national guardsmen had shot down four students in cold blood on their own campus. Now cops kill people everywhere, all the time.
Less than one whole year, but what a workout »Buy This Photo!«
While trying to bring order and hygiene to the hopeless dusty piles of papers, artifacts, books, bins of old photos, knives and razors, small tools, musical instruments, computer gear, and magical objects that surround my desk and drive me insane, I was surprised to find a few slides—for-real, ancient, 35mm slides—from northwest Arkansas dated April, 1971. What a significant time in my life. Interesting that this popped up now, too.
That’s my very special ’63 VW camper bus and sturdy tent from Sears. I’d driven up from Wharton, Texas to scout out a spot on the 170 acres four friends of mine and I had purchased earlier that spring. We paid ten grand. Yes, that’s fifty bucks per acre. Other than being in darkest Arkansas, about which we were dangerously naive, it was a virtual paradise of woods, fields, and streams. There was even a waterfall. I was six weeks away from leaving my junior college teaching job. If I could make it until August, I’d turn twenty-seven, and my draft board would leave me alone. The government would stop trying to kill me, and I could do what I wanted! Can you imagine the tension and release?! You young guys, probably not, but try. From the “Child of God” chapter in my Taos Soul book:
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