The Envy of Poets
[Photo By: KPA]
Not to be a bore with the details, but I had to find some kind of leafy cover from the sharp daylight so that my little bird didn't come out as a silhouette. Then I did some tweaking with my digital dark room (that is exactly what it is. Artists - photographers (and painters too, and Greek sculptors) have tweaked their images since time immemorial. But without those little birds for whom we wait patiently in their impatient flutter to fit into the frame - the frames we outline and find suitable for them to sit in, such things as digital keyboards would just be another gadget destined for the garbage truck.
The trick with photography is often waiting. There were many birds fluttering around these blossom trees, often reacting to a passerby, or some distant rumble (Wind? Sea? lion? I don't have their sensitivity.)
But they get used to me, my stillness - I could be a magical tree or something - and my long (I use a zoom lense) protrusion, and they hop around from branch to branch, impatient and never still for long.
"Free as a bird" isn't quite true. Yes these birds roam the sky as they apparently wish, but they have to find food. shelter, mates, nesting material, and protection from hot and cold temperatures, not to mention rain.
They are simply themselves. That is what we (and poets) envy.