A Photograph, not a Snapshot

With literally thousands of snapshots and selfies are recorded everyday,  I have seen a decline in clients looking for a professional photographer.  Weddings and baby photos are exceptions, however often the quality and artfulness of the photos in print miss the mark when people go for the least cost and often least experience in doing that work. Over the years, I have discovered that time spent editing a group of photos is 2 to 3 times the minutes or hours spent in actually "taking the photos".  During that time at the computer, in a nutshell this is what happens:  The best images are selected and set aside.  A second review is done for the selection of first choice photos. Photos are corrected for accurate color. This and the other basic corrections mentioned next, require in the least a calibrated monitor.  The primary monitor I use is a NEC­­­­® and calibration requires software and external measuring device used directly on the screen. Colorite® color cards are used to calibrate the camera.  Contrast, intensity of color, strength of shadows and highlights are adjusted. (Differences in these visuals and composition define differences in styles of one photographer next to another. Images are sharpened for print, projector or computer monitor and cropped(edges adjusted) to allow specific print sizes and provide the best display in print or on Internet.

Photography has a definite place in fine art and this photo is an example. This is the photographers interpretation of the time and place, presenting it as the photographer wants with an atmosphere and mood you would be pressed to find on an everyday drive here, rain or not.

Vultures, Turkey Vulture, Black Vulture, Buzzards, Baby Vultires to Adults

To begin, we have the newbies to the vulture world.  These are babies too young to fly, still covered with baby down.  The ones shown grow a little over the span of the photos. The one above is a couple of weeks later in development than the same birds shown eating below. These babies come out of the shelter of their "box", hissing like some unknown creature and shuffling along the floor like armored tanks from World War I.   But these are not tanks, they are babies who need to grow up to survive.

   A hissssssssss is the sound of baby vultures.  Of course when eating, there is much less hisssssss and a lot more chopping sound of beaks taking in a nice treat of deceased mice. 

Three weeks later, notice the black wings showing as down is lost and wing feathers emerge.

The photo below is approximately 5 weeks later than the first photograph of the black vultures covered with down.

  
  While in captivity, the vultures are given little attention except for feeding and cage cleaning. Why are these birds not allowed to socialize with humans?  Have you heard of imprinting?  There are stories of a newly born chicken emerging from the egg and the first view is a person. The chick then follows the person around  "believing" that person is its mother.   How true are the chicken stories I do not know.  What is fact is that young birds can be imprinted on humans, losing their own identity and considering the human "their type".   Once imprinted, the birds cannot be released into the wild as healthy birds should be.  They become dependent on people, not fearful and have likely lost the ability to socialize with their own kind.   At the Clinch River Raptor Center the aim is to restore baby birds to the wild, where they were intended to be.  Survival depends on not being friends with people and learning to be what they are...vultures.  With the down gone, the vultures grow into sleek, well designed birds as is seen later in this post.

Vulture mantle ornament, black bears with pink snouts...
its madness!  The gloved hand holding the jesses of this black vulture let you know this is a real, living bird.  She was part of a demonstration at Amicalola Falls State Park, Georgia. This bird is imprinted and has no place in the wild. As it is, being social with humans dooms the bird to a life of education for people...and very good care with regular meals topping normal road kill. The whiter feathers on the ends of the wings and the gray head identifies this as a black vulture. The flying vulture photo at the end is a turkey vulture, two tone wings from below without the highly contrasted light wing tips.  Turkey vultures also have a red face.


Obviously, those cute stuffed animals are not black bears and look most like Asian Honey Bears.  Coloring black bears this way is commonplace, not unlike giving all cartoon crows a yellow beak. The colors of the black vulture are real. 

Going bald, a sign of maturity or old age...with vultures going bald is an expected and needed part of getting out of the teenage years. If you are dipping your face into the carcass of a dead animal, feathers matted with last night's supper is not desirable. The bald head helps keep the face clean, as possibly the featherless legs help keep the legs clean of dead animal matter.  Making a meal of fresh carrion is the scavenger way of survival.  Freshly dead is preferred to road pancakes. Stomach acids are quite as is the immune system of which the strong digestive acids must play a part.  You do not want vulture vomit on your skin.


The following two photos show a transition of hairline in a vulture growing up. Note the dates of the photos in the upper left corners. Click to see and enlarged version of the photograph.

 

And finally here is a photograph of a Turkey Vulture.  This is flying in the wild above Center Hill Lake in Tennessee.  Turkey vultures go further north than do black vultures and the reason has to do with slide. A black vulture will slide down while soaring at a quicker rate than does a turkey vulture. This means the black vulture needs stronger thermals (uplifts of rising air) to help it stay aloft and soar for long periods of time. Southern areas have stronger thermals suited for the black vulture and northern areas have weaker thermals. The turkey vulture does  fine in northern thermals but the air is too weak to help the black vulture stay aloft while soaring...and vultures are known for soaring.  Black vultures stay mostly in southern areas.

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ABOUT THE VULTURES FEATURED IN THIS POST

The babies were found apparently lost or otherwise separated from their parents. These were raised until ready to be transferred to caretakers who specialize in vultures.  Often, the birds may be united with a  flock of wild birds.  I am not certain where these birds went. They did leave in healthy condition.

The vulture demonstrating "how to go bald" was also transferred.

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There are no buzzards in this post.

Although vultures are generally called buzzards in the USA, 

buzzard is the appropriate name for soaring hawks, as used in the United Kingdom. The word has been misused for years.

That being said, I do not call vultures "buzzards".

Still, there is no way I can bring myself to call hawks buzzards. 

What is Awkward Beauty? Grab some kettle corn and take a short walk with me.

Landing Heron.. awkward beauty---As plain as the web page in front of me are these words in the page header. Awkward beauty? What is that? We all have definitions of beauty. There is a huge range in the world of human emotion and points of view, covering images, events and memories. With a special flower, an entire crowd may agree it is beautiful and lovely to see. Move away from the obviously lovely and the the label beauty is somewhat awkwardly taped on the corner like an afterthought. An image of dead hostas in winter was beautiful to me and when uploaded to a photography website a commentator expressed surprise. Every year she was compelled to rake up the dead and fallen foliage at her home because it was dead and fallen. To the eye of the beholder the label of beauty may be awkwardly affixed with a piece of torn and soiled tape. Possibly she took a moment to look again at her fallen hostas and saw more than an automatic chore of raking up the dead. I suspect hers went quickly and were long gone when I uploaded the photo.  That photo resides somewhere on this blog.

The title awkward beauty came to mind when the heron in the header photo was landing in the tree.. The entire maneuver appeared so awkward with long legs at all angles and large wings trying to maintain balance and gain a secure hold in the branches. I thought the bird picked the wrong place to land but it knew better and the end was a different sort of gracefulness well adapted to the heron.

This post will tell tiny stories with photos to illustrate. Cart before the horse or the other way, the stories came and so did the photos. Do enjoy the points of view presented here. Or, consider me mad, mad, mad and someone who if running naked in the street would make more sense…maybe to you. To me, that would be very awkward and anything but beauty. I do have a full length closet mirror. A roll of tape would not fix the label to stay on out of the starting block. Mothers would cover the eyes of young children, like at the zoo.  The rest would laugh and cheer it on!  Run, Run! Ask them through their laughter, "That sure was funny. Was it beautiful?" ..."NO". 

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I think you might see  a sort of beauty in this post...take a look and find no need to cover any eyes..

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The King House..abandoned today but prior to 1956 it was cheerful and home to school teachers on snowbound evenings...so I was told.

Photo taken just in front of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton, Tennessee.

The center is now a museum and reminder of the events leading up to and following

integration of the local high school in 1956. 

 We went to the town and visited the center several years ago. The abandoned house

caught my eye and I asked about its story.

The governor of Tennessee was wise when he said, "Go ahead and get it done. Integrate the schools," In 1956 it happened in Clinton, Tennessee, said to be the first school integrated likely anywhere in this country.  There was at least one which was integrated earlier but that distinction is not important. 

If you don't know what integration was or is, think of black kids not being allowed to attend the city high school and being bused instead to an all black student school in another city. The opposite of integration is segregation, a divide of people "justified" by race or other reason and which generally favors the ruling class. Some folks knew better and others did not give it much thought. Believe it, when the judge said we are moving on this now to get it done in Clinton, ears perked up and people reacted.  They say outsiders came in to stir the tempers and subdue supporters of the integration. Were some local folks involved? Of course...someone and the culture was wanting those black kids kept out of the white high school long before the governor spoke in his determined words and local law listened and decided to move on it. Some like a local white Baptist minister knew it was time to move on to better values and acceptance of fellow man. Others along with outside instigators believed big sticks and violence was justified to maintain status quo,  leaving things alone and no change tolerated.

The integration problems did happen but that is not the story or the beauty of the King house, shown here much later after more recent owners left it,  apparently abandoned and in disrepair.

Up the hill is a school building, an old one.  That is where the black kids in town went to school up to when they were old enough for high school. The home owners saw a need for education and for the teachers to be comfortable.  Maybe there was more snow back then because I am told when the teachers were snowed in or would be taking a risk driving home and returning to school the next day, they were offered congenial lodging at the old house.  Of course, the house was not old back then but a nice home with room for the teachers to spend the evening.  My first thought was that nowadays school would have been closed for even the threat of snow.  Back then, I reckon it stayed open and the kids walked to school.  The now caved porch would be a fine place to sit and visit on a summer evening, too. There is beauty in this old house, more than I first thought.

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A view from an old hotel on Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio

The hotel is real and so is the view. It is different at night when with

little else to do, one looks around at the buildings and

sees someone else looking from their window.

What follows is fiction.

"I saw you look out of your window last night. Are you there now? Is everyone gone, are you in the dark alone or with others? You are there. I saw you last night...did you see me when you looked up? My building is higher than yours; yours is only a few levels. I am on the 13th floor with more above me. I feel those floors pressing down on me tonight. I suspect we will never meet, well, no consequence. I have been in this room too, too long. When will you look out your window!"

It might be a stretch to find the beauty in this one, even in a awkward sense.  I saw it in the daytime working hours of the city along this street and all the view from the hotel window. Nighttime was not the same, yes, people on the streets and in clubs but with too many dark corners to suit me. 

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This photo was arranged to portray an idea and the  beauty of getting beyond this image.

Tea parties in her mind: This a fictional depiction of reality.

I ask you look beyond a bleak scene to see a woman who once sat in this chair, in poverty on the streets and in the mission shelters..

With assistance of specially able people who understand how to help, she now has a little home and and is employed. She now has

a lovely tea party and all her friends are there to share the scones.

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The photographs shown are older ones picked from stored files.  Editing technique was less sophisticated than today
  but with the same eye behind the shutter. 
The point of view has changed in several ways over a few years.

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Clear Wing Moth, also called Sphinx and Hummingbird Moth

This beautiful moth got my attention, flying very close to my face as it passed quickly to land on a brick wall.  At first look was a pretty but unknown insect with all the warning colors of a huge, huge bee or wasp of some sort.  With a side view, I recognized a moth-like face and body structure.  The awkward introduction and trepidation turned to curiosity at seeing a beautiful creature for the first time. It sat a while then flew away, boasting extra long legs for a moth.

These photos were taken with an old Minolta point and shoot in 2005. Modern point and shoot cameras with a macro capability will do better.  Be certain to keep unedited original files and only edit copies of your digital photos.  The moth photos had been edited and the originals were not available. Today I would have done better in processing the photos had the originals been saved properly. I have seen only one moth like this since 2005.

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Can a large crawling bug be beautiful?

I believe so but many folks will want to get away

or even squash this harmless millipede.

This creature makes for an awkward encounter and

by all appearances is dangerous..
red and black and 3 inches long.

People jump and back away, women scream,

 men pretend to be brave and are tempted to step on it...

watching for it to attack or swing up and get them.

The Tennessee Flat Back Millipede is not dangerous;

the warning looks are possibly for self protection.

The flat back millipede lives in southern states where weather is suitable, You will see these large bugs in garden mulch, under decaying leaves and in areas of downed vegetation. They prefer to be under cover.  Beautiful..depending on the eye of the beholder!   Here is scientific link with better photos:  http://tolweb.org/brachoria

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Cedar Waxwings

The beauty of these social birds is well known and appreciated.

The body feathers appear like a soft velvet, smoothed and fresh.
Red tips on the wings look like a fine sealing wax. There is nothing to deny this beauty. "Awkward" was standing beneath branches of a tree full of these migrating birds.  I looked up and saw bird bottoms, everywhere. 

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