FLEDGLINGS IN A STRAIGHT LIFE..transitional home for women needs funding to help residents learn to fly a new, meaningful path

Many people out of jail must return to the environment from where they came and will not have enough support to hold out and make it.  Some will make it and be fine parents to their children.  All out of jail deserve at lease a chance to go right and stay that way.

No person should be considered disposable.Certainly the ladies at Alpha House are not. God love them..God Bless them, they all have touched my heart and blessed me. That is why I have referred to them as "jailbirds" in an affectionate way with nothing disparaging about its honesty. Today, I will stop using that term publicly and apologize for any who were possibly offended. These ladies have a
piece of life history which happens to be public record of incarceration. Is that bit of history going to shade their lives from now on?  Yes, consequences are to be paid and life experience will shape the approach to life and "how to's" of survival and handling relationships.  Costs are often higher than the "rest of us" can imagine or honestly handle.  Yet, many of the ladies do make it past that anchor of the past and move on to establish straight and productive lives.  There is no better spokesperson about the need for deep healing the entire person and environment than these ladies who have been there, who have been in a darkness the fortunate ones will have difficulty imagining. 

The affectionate term I will now use is fledglings, young birds just free of the nest and ready to apply survival skills they have learned and are learning daily.  Flight will be a tumble at first but soon will carry the distance, with a jumbled landing now and then but better each day.  The path for any fledgling is growth and maturity in a new life.

 

The women in the Alpha House transitional home come for the most part fresh out of jail and facing long probation. They can gain credit for time in the transitional home and it sure beats other options.  They are not free but have a taste of it, living in a nice home with a bedroom to share with a roommate and call “their place”.  They have a place to exercise and stay fit, a place to have life skills training such as how to use computers…a place to regain or learn afresh self-image, social skills and confidence.

 A block party earlier in 2012 featured a Christian band.  

Those at the party understood the need for helping others get back on their path.

Alpha House is a Christian faith based facility and is a place the women may find faith in our Creator, discover they are God’s children and become sisters of Jesus Christ.  This faith is a powerful sustaining force in helping the ladies develop a new outlook on living in the world and in living with strength and peace in recognition of their own fallen past years.

The website for Tennessee Offender Reentry list various organizations set up to help felons and other offenders in transition to a new and straight life.  http://www.tnoffenderreentry.com/housing-transitional/

You will see Alpha House in Oliver Springs among the listings.

A new smaller residence is open and active as of January, 2013.,
Oliver Springs, TN 37840
865-435-3399
http://www.alphahouseinc.net
Fee: None

 Alpha House needs to exist!  The ladies running it need strength and lots of endurance through this time. Pray for wisdom, pray for donations, help as you personally are able.

The list of organizations set up to help offenders in Tennessee is impressive but a critical aspect of it does not show:  Who pays for it !    Government grants are often not workable in the faith based transitional home like Alpha House. Funding from other sources and maintenance of that funding is difficult. As this blog post was  written during September 2012, edited on December 29 and clarified with a new post on January 17, 2013 to reflect new positive developments, the staff and volunteers of Alpha House are seeking grants and contacting churches and organizations in effort to gain regular monthly funding. Without a substantial increase in funding, the future is not rosy even with a new home being prepared for new residents.

The power point slide show which was here to tell the situation and hopefully draw some interests in funding for Alpha House is no longer relevant and is deleted.  While the slide show was available, a pleasing number of downloads were made and it did reach an audience.

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. 

Vultures, Turkey Vultures, Black Vultures, Buzzards, Post is on the way!

As soon as I gather the photos from around this blog and my hard drives there will be a post on Vultures, everyone's fav bird.  I am slowly circling the files and gathering up the stuff for a fine little post to chew on for a while.   Got a vulture pic, a decent one? Send it to me and get credit in the post.

Fireworks Show, Pyro Shows does well in Oak Ridge, Tennessee with happy viewers but photographer not as successful with fireworks photographs

Each fireworks photograph has a caption with the camera settings. These are settings you may use as a photo guide line or rule of thumb. Read the previous blog post for settings used last year: This year exposure was longer. The same remote(bulb) shutter trigger method was used but more time was spent trying to get the best photo image. What was different? The fireworks show was different, at least it seemed different. This year many more multiple fireworks shots were done with overlapping blasts. Taking a photograph of a single shot and blast was difficult, indeed.

All photos were taken with manual settings: ISO 100, f/9, shutter controlled with a remote release(bulb). Times are given with each fireworks photo posted.

 4.1 sec. Fireworks Chaos

The multiple pyrotechnics shot rapidly together created a spectacular light of color and combination of fire forms in the night sky. The above photograph is one I call “pyro chaos” to describe the rapid fire shells and color blasts. The show was effective but proved difficult to photograph single, well defined pyrotechnic blast forms.  The ones show here are  exceptions to the normal photos of that evening.

2.1 sec

3.9 sec, a favorite blast photo---note the second tail indicating

a second display was just missed and would have 

overlapped and obscured this fireworks "angelic palm tree".

The company presenting the fireworks is located in La Follette, Tennessee, an easy 40 minute drive from the city where these photographs were shot.   Pyro Shows  presents smaller shows like the one we saw and huge spectacular pyrotechnic events in major cities across the USA.  Many shows are custom designed to suit the event and may contain custom made pyrotechnic display explosives. I wonder how a person becomes a fireworks designer or engineer?

 1.4 sec, wonderfully beautiful pyrotechnics

FIREWORKS PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMERA SETTINGS HOW TO

The great American holiday of The Fourth of July is next week. At the local fireworks show, you will see people taking photos with what they have including flip phones, smart phones, iPADs and point and shoot cameras(turn off the flash). A few photographers will have cameras set on tripods and will look seriously ready for the show to begin. Others will be fumbling with the tripod, fumbling with camera settings and moving around to find the best place to stand. A few might embarrassingly trip in the dark. I know how easy that is to do 

This is a short tutorial how-to on taking photos of fireworks displays at night.  If you have a camera with manual settings you will do much better than using settings such as “P” or automatic program which lets the camera choose what to do.  Bright light against a dark background will often confuse the camera’s control and you will not get the photos you want.  This tutorial on taking photographs of fireworks tells the methods and camera settings which worked for me last year.  Other photographers will use different settings that  add up to about the same overall exposure.

First, use manual on the camera.  This means you set the shutter speed and set the aperture (lens opening also called “f stop”) and go with that for most of the photos.  You definitely need a tripod or very sturdy support.

If your camera has a “bulb” or “manual shutter” setting, use that.  What this does is allow you to open and close the shutter when you decide enough time has passed. The camera must be very, very steady for this procedure.  With more advanced cameras, there will be a means for using a remote switch for opening and closing the shutter, making it much easier to do without concern that you will shake the camera.  If you do not have bulb or manual shutter controls, then set the camera to manual using one of the settings shown with the photos in this fireworks tutorial.  Go easy when you push the shutter and you should get good photographs of the fiery display.

Here are the photographs from July 4, 2011.  The information is in the caption to each photo. Note how more or less of the tail and blast of the firework device shows in the shot, depending on the shutter time.   Since I had a remote shutter control, the times were what I wanted right then and I did play with the time somewhat.  I suggest without a remote shutter control that you pick a shutter time from the sort of photo you like from that shown.

Camera Settings:  These settings were used for all the fireworks photographs shown. The only setting changed was shutter speed. See shutter speed with each photo caption. 

• ISO(considered digital film speed):  ISO 100
• F Stop, the lens aperture: f/9
• If your camera does not go down to ISO 100, you may try a tighter aperture, maybe close to f/16 with ISO 200.  Experiment with the situation to find what is working for you.

This is a relatively long exposure with a shutter speed of 3.6 seconds.

You will notice how the smoke shows in the light and some of the

local terrain is lit enough to barely show up.

AS with all the photographs of fireworks display, the ISO was 100

and the f stop was f/9.

Shutter exposure time: 1.6 seconds

Fireworks Shutter exposure time:  1.4 seconds

Fireworks Shutter exposure time:  1.2 seconds

Fireworks Shutter exposure time:  1.0 seconds

Fireworks Shutter exposure time:  0.8 seconds

You will easily see how the relatively short shutter speed of 0.8 seconds(above) does not show the tail of fire from the fireworks shell prior to the blast of color.  I will likely be using a shutter opening time of 1 second to 1.5 seconds on the night of July 4 to take fireworks photos.  Try what you like and experiment during the show!  Best results wished for you with your photos of July 4 fireworks displays.

New Photo Website..new site, temporary name:! Thomas Haynes Photography

I am working on a photo gallery website and although not finished I need to announce that here.  The site is Thomas Haynes Photography  a gallery hosting website.   I hope to be using a more marketable name in the not too distant future, one not relying on my personal name and also better in search engine location. The new name name is not yet chosen, considering the one I had selected is taken already. However, the new name will end with less emphasis  on "Thomas Haynes". Our intent as photographer has always been to take the desire and vision of the client..perhaps you..and combine that with our creative perspective and technical abilities to produce an image capturing the vision of the customer with remarkable clarity of meaning.  We are not speaking of photos simply technically on the mark because it is more than that:  The photograph ideally will relate what the customer sees in  personal vision combined with our rendering of that vision in a most appropriate manner: We want you to see the image and feel, well, "Oh my, that is it!"

Of course, some photos are simply fun, fill the memories of the moments and record the faces of loved ones on a rare occasion together...that sort of photo..the kids in the pool or the cat hanging from the curtain.  These are small events in the scheme of life but important in a box of little joys and smiles of memory.


 For now our host is Zenfolio and each day we add a touch here or there to improve the presence of Thomas Haynes there. As galleries are added with more photos, will the more complete and newly named version stay on Zenfolio? I  do not have all the answers yet and it is much too early to judge any success I might yet have in being seen by search engines. That does not happen without much effort and certainly not this soon do we reach our goal.
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 Rowing Through Silver..posted previously in this blog but appropriate for now.

All is in the works.  Guests and users of the present website will be notified when any change takes place.   For now, please visit and take a look. Yes, some photos were first published in this blog and others are more recent, including private viewing galleries for clients.  Sign the guest page.  Every visit and guest comment is encouragement to reach for the full realization of photography with Thomas Haynes and get that going strong, renamed and branded.