Spoonbill

I saw my spiritual director today. There were some significant things I wanted to share with him, and hoped he would help me find the voice of God. I wasn't disappointed.

We talked about my photography as prayer: as a way of seeing the immeasurable beauty and diversity and inventiveness and elegance and irrepressible energy of the Universe, and of communicating something of that. Visual prayers. I left John's place grateful for being able to articulate a little better something which is taking up an increasing proportion of my life.

On the way home I noticed that the tide was still low enough for the spoonbills to be feeding, so parked my car beside the Marne St. Hospital and walked along the shore of the Anderson's Bay Inlet. I have been watching a small colony of spoonbills there for some months, and although most had eaten their fill of mollusks and cockabullies and flounders, the adolescent female was still looking for a few morsels before the tide got higher. I set up the camera, got out of the car and watched her for a half hour or so.

She finished feeding and began the ablutions which I knew to be the prolegomena to a short flight over to the family roost. The water was clear and still. She splashed about and picked at her feathers. Then tensed her body and eased into the air. Such effortless grace and beauty in a bird that is so bizarrely ungainly.

Most photographic sessions I take maybe 100 shots, discard 20 of them for technical reasons and if I'm lucky, find, when I examine the rest on my computer, maybe 5 that I'm pleased with. Today I took 159, discarded 3, and discovered, when I looked, about 120 that I'm pleased with, including the one above which I am more satisfied with than any other picture I have ever taken.

So here it is. It can't hope to capture the life and energy of these odd birds, or the coolness of a Dunedin morning, or the clear, organically rich water, but it may suggest it. It's my morning's prayer and I offer it to you.

Photo: Nikon d750; Tamron 150-600 @600mm; 1/100, f8, iso 220. I set the aperture to f8, which is the sharpest point for my long lens, the shutter to 1/1000 to capture the motion of the wings, and let the camera choose the iso.

Comments

Elaine Dent said…

"...so the gods shake us from our sleep." Mary Oliver in "Gratitude"

1 May 2019 at 14:48

Merv said…

Gratefully accepted.

1 May 2019 at 15:50

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