April 2023

Far From the Madding Crowd
Whitewater Draw, Arizona
2023

With all the thousands of cranes, snow geese, and blackbirds gathered in the relatively small area of water at Whitewater Draw, you’d think it would be hard to find a moment to yourself. Yet several ducks managed to do just that.

Sharp as Tacks
Whitewater Draw, Arizona
2023

When you switch from photographing relatively still birds on the ground to those suddenly in flight without time to adjust your slow shutter speed accordingly, unpredictable results can happen. That is, while you will predictable get blurred images, they won’t always be uninteresting as a result. I find images like this one very intriguing. It’s surreal and almost threateningly spooky in a way. (And that would be true even if I hadn’t seen Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds.)

Hanging With the Mob
Whitewater Draw, Arizona
2023

The big draw for photographers at Whitewater Draw are the sandhill cranes. But there are a “few” other birds hanging around as well, in this case what I believe to be some species of black bird. They were much more fun to photograph than the cranes, for me anyway. No one else seemed to be pointing their cameras in that direction.

Heading West
Whitewater Draw, Arizona
2023

Straight Across
Whitewater Draw, Arizona
2023

In the End, Crows Inherited the Earth
Bozeman, Montana
2023

That’s not how it was supposed to go.

Piled High
Whitewater Draw, Arizona
2023

I took a lot, as in several thousand photos of the sandhill cranes flying around at Whitewater Draw. (It’s easy to get that number of images in fairly short order if, like many cameras, mine will take 15-20 photos a second in burst mode.) A lot of those images were trashed immediately when I went through them at home due to poor focus, lighting, or other reasons. But a huge number remain. What I found when going through them is that I’m just not that interested in them the same way I am with crows, ravens, and other corvids. At least that’s true if they aren’t “posing” in some interesting way anyhow. So I won’t be posting many of them here, but will show a few if for no other reason than I spent so much time on them, both taking the photos and sorting through them all! I liked this image because of the way the four birds were stacked vertically.

How to Stand Out in a Crowd
Whitewater Draw, Arizona
2023

When you’re one in literally thousands wearing the same outfit, you have to do something special to stand out.

Taking a Dump on Main Street
Bisbee, Arizona
2023

My apologies for the rather crude title for this image. I was practicing my click-bait skills, and got carried away.

Don’t Be You!
Bisbee, Arizona
2023

Like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, this somewhat disturbing scene in the backstreets of Bisbee is perhaps a portent of what a tortured mind might become if you allow it.