While this chase is about to result in a tangled fight over a morsel of food, at this point it is still characterized by the balance between wind, wings, and gravity that results in the beauty of flight rather than a taunting gravity moment.

Two ravens working on establishing the aerial pecking order.

I could have called this series "food fight" as a lot of these encounters started with a contest over a food source.

Sometimes flying is a contact sport.

The photographer Aaron Siskind did a series of photos back in the '50s of people suspended in the air in various poses after jumping off a diving board. He called his work "Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation." The title is sometimes also written with the word "terrors" preceding "pleasures". (Perhaps his choice of the order of the words depended on his own feelings of confidence or uncertainty at the time.)  

 

My images of ravens in odd mid-air poses suggested to me an avian version of Siskind's work. I would have loved to steal his title too.  

 

 

 

Terrors and Pleasures of Levitation, No. 474 

Aaron Siskind 

1954

Sometimes birds seem to act in complete disregard to the laws of gravity.

A fellow told me this summer he figured crows and ravens are pretty smart. He concluded this after observing that, while you see them eating road kill all the time, you never see a dead one on the highway. So they must at least be smart enough to know when to get out of the way. That intelligence must extend to power lines as well. I see them sitting on power poles like this all the time but I've never seen one get electrocuted.

Not quite perfect, but these two ravens are doing a pretty good job of creating a symmetrical composition atop this power pole.

One piece of pizza left and a group of ravens was happily sharing it until one of them got a little greedy and flew off with it.

There's nothing better than waking up to the sound of surf, a view of the empty ocean, and a beach freshly scoured by the high tide; not even diamonds on the soles of your shoes. 

 

Shapes and shadows from the boat docks in Newport.

Just an interesting pattern of lines and shadows.

I see an airplane landing on the water, some birds in the air. Those vertical lines, I don't know, maybe water spouts? Or maybe it's all just some Arabic graffiti.

A close-up of yesterday's grain elevator.

I was surprised to see a grain elevator in the middle of the Willamette Valley. I guess they grow more than grapes there.

These trees guard the boundary between the beach and the headlands. They'll be the first to go when the ocean tries to make its next incursion.

Making up interesting titles for images is half the fun of doing these POTDs, but sometimes I have a photo that I like quite a bit but for which I just can't think of anything to call it other than the obvious. I guess this is what Freud meant when he purportedly said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

A big empty beach and no driftwood in sight except one huge log. The statistician in me makes me wonder what probability model would explain how a single tree ended up here all by itself.

A sandstone cliff eroding into sand and depositing it at the head of the beach. A great example of how beaches are made.

You can tell the lighthouse at Yaquina Head is no longer in operation because the windows are so dirty. The descriptions of the lives of lighthouse keepers mention how much time they spend cleaning the lens of the lighthouse beacon as well as the surrounding windows it shines through in order to maximize the distance out in the ocean  from which the beacon could be seen. You'd have to be really into cleaning glass to have that job and if that were the case I'm sure they couldn't stand to have dirty windows in the living quarters.

A beach composed entirely of black pebbles is kind of a rarity in Oregon. The signage at Yaquina Head didn't really explain why this beach is different. Based on what I did read and observe, I think it is because the pebbles are basalt from a geologically recent volcanic eruption that haven't had time to be ground into sand yet while sand on the other more typical beaches in the area is from softer, older sandstone. That theory seems to make sense to me, but trips like this make me wonder why I never took a geology course in all those years I spent in school. The older I get the more I'm faced with situations in which I realize there are holes in what I know you could drive a truck through.

You watch my back, I'll watch yours. Or maybe I'll just be the first to spot the next food source and beat you to it.

A raven flying along the beach looking for goodies exposed by the receding tide.

Hair-like roots from an uprooted pine. They seem to be still trying to draw in moisture to sustain growth in the downed tree.

When I see a curved tree like this it always makes me wonder what event happened in its youth that affected it and not the trees around it. Maybe a moose stepped on it when it was just a sapling.

I was struck by how much this photo looks like a partly burned forest with smoke still moving through the trees. Yet it is just the bare understory of a dense forest in fog.

Getting up early on a foggy, rainy day to go hiking is a good way to insure some solitude on the trail--and some nice moody photographs as well.

I'm not that into people photography, but sometimes an image with people in it has too much to say to be ignored. Does it still count as street photography if you're on a beach?

With apologies to John Steinbeck, I had to use this title since these grapes look like they're about to experience some rough treatment from Mother Nature.

We traveled through Oregon wine country on our way to the coast yesterday. I love the mosaic patterns the rows of grape vines make on the rolling hills.