Photography Quotations

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
– Henri Cartier-Bresson –

Actually, I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.
– Henri Cartier-Bresson –

Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.
– Author Unknown –

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.
– Author Unknown –

Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop.
– Usman B. Asif –

He had a photographic memory which was never developed.
– Author Unknown –

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.
– Lewis Hine –

If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event… what kind of film would you use?
– Author Unknown –

I gaze at the sunset with the woman I love and think F8 At 1/250.
– Canon Cameras-

I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it.
– Author Unknown –

I’ve taken up photography because it’s the only hobby where I can shoot people and cut their heads off without going to jail.
– Aunty Acid –

No picture has a single meaning.
– Simon Watney –

Photography is a tough life: you can be taken, framed, exposed, shot, captured, and hung all in the same day.
– Author Unknown –

There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.
– Abraham Lincoln –

Shoot the kids. Hang the family. Frame the wife.
– Sign in a Photography Framing Shop –

There is 3 key things for good photography: the camera, lighting and… photoshop.
– Tyra Banks –

The quickest way to make money at photography is to sell your camera.
– Author Unknown –

To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
– Edward Weston –

When I Was Your Age: It took a week to learn whether your photos came out okay.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2014 –

You find a lot of junk when you’re searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you’ll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you’re certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you’re hooked for life.
– Ransom Riggs –

You will regret that cell-phone self-portrait in the bathroom mirror one day.
– Unknown Author –

When you snap a picture of another person, two fundamental rights often come into play: the right of the photographer to free expression and the right of the subject to privacy (the right to be left alone).
– Lien Verbauwhede, 2006 –

This is the Week That Was: February 27, 2019

The Lighter Side of Arts, Crafts and Leisure Activities

I’m a ‘jack of all trades’ in the crafts department. I’ve never stuck with anything long enough to get really good at it… except for collecting quotes.

On the Crafts front, I’ve been collecting red Tim’s Iced Capp straws (so I can keep them out of where ever discarded straws go in my prairie province.) I wasn’t sure what to make out of them until I saw this sculpture by the artist David Moreno who makes these out of steel rods. I think I could use my red straws for a project like this – I have just about enough straws for the house on the far left…

In some Future Time or State

I believe in the hereafter.
Every time I walk into a room, I ask, “What am I here after?”
– Author Unknown –

Grapefruit and the Post Office

We have a grapefruit tree at the Arizona house. Sometimes the fruit is oddly shaped, but it is delicious. I am more than optimistic that there will be enough fruit to last me until we go home, in addition to the fruit we will take to the post office every few days. No, we don’t mail it. Our post office simply has a box on a bench near the door where people share their fruit harvest.

Our post office also has an ‘alpha box’. This is a series of ‘pigeon holes’, each with a letter of the alphabet on it. You can ‘mail’ letters to anyone in our community (without buying postage) by putting them in the appropriate alpha box.

A Great Horned Owl on the Fence

It is impossible to not be optimistic about life when a Great Horned Owl sits on your fence.

He respects Owl, because you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right.
– A. A. Milne –

How to Know When a Politician is Out of Touch

Catherine McKenna is Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change. She was lamenting about the cold. She had apparently not noticed how cold Canada gets every winter.

What examples have you heard where politicians in your community appear to have lost touch with common sense?

One Thing Leads to Another – Telemarketers

We are kind of like this dog when it comes to our home phone. Even though we know that 99% of the time a ringing home phone is a telemarketer, we still go over to the phone to check the call display!

Apparently, the best way to get a telemarketer to stop calling you is to say: “Please put me on your do not call list.” Don’t give them any other information. Don’t engage with them. Don’t get upset.

One of my daughters used to respond to telemarketers by immediately putting her Small Child on the phone. Small Child was always full of questions and observations. Telemarketers with heavy foreign accents were easy prey for a boy without much of a filter between his young brain and his mouth.

Bronzed Cowbird

The Feather Files
Name: Bronzed Cowbird
Species: Molothrus aeneus
Native to and Migration: A Central American bird that makes its way to the United States in the border states and Louisiana.
Date Seen: April 30, 2018
Location: North of Fountain Hills, Arizona

Notes: Like other cowbirds, the female does not make a nest, but instead lays her eggs in the nests of other bird species. (Brood parasites.)

Pied-billed Grebe

The Feather Files
Name: Pied-billed Grebe
Species: Podilymbus podiceps
Native to and Migration: Breeds from northern Canada through the West Indies and Central America to southern South America. It is seldom seen in flight, in part because it migrates by night, landing on the nearest body of water before or at dawn.
Date Seen: February 17, 2019
Location: Fountain Hills, Arizona

Notes: The nest of this species is a floating platform. It lives in freshwater marshes, lakes, and sluggish rivers, and, in winter, brackish estuaries.

Yellow-headed Blackbird

The Feather Files
Name: Yellow-headed Blackbird
Species: Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus
Native to and Migration: Populations that breed in the Canadian prairies migrate southeast and then due south across the United States to wintering grounds in the Southwest and throughout Mexico. They form large flocks of thousands of birds that forage in crop fields, ranchlands, and farmyards from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas through much of Mexico.
Date Seen: May 3, 2018
Location: Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Utah

Notes: The female chooses a nest site within a male’s territory. The nest always overhangs shallow water in wetlands, marshes, ponds and rivers.

Arizona Snow Yesterday and Today

Yesterday (Friday, February 22, 2019): Our Arizona back yard (north of Fountain Hills). Heavy wet snow caused quite a bit of damage to trees in our area.

Today (Saturday, February 23): View from our roof top patio – The Foothills just north of us.

I’m not going to complain about the cold weather and snow we’ve had here this month. It is vastly warmer than our northern home in Alberta. We are, however, flying back to Alberta for a few weeks to attend a few family events. It is still pretty cold there, but the upside is Alberta home heating systems are vastly superior! I won’t need to be sitting in my chair with a couple blankets and a heating pad, waiting for the furnace to take the chill off the room!

What has your winter been like this year?

Pelican

Juvenile Brown Pelican with a Topaz Studio Line Draw Filter.

A Grass Seed ‘Marble’ – an Amazing Circle filter

Swainson’s Hawks – Summer 2018

The Feather Files
Name: Swainson’s Hawk
Species: Buteo swainsoni
Native to and Migration: In fall they fly to their Argentine wintering grounds in one of the longest migrations of any raptor. They form flocks of hundreds or thousands as they travel.
Date Seen: August 30, 2018
Location: North of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Notes: These birds prefer to live on prairies, plains, and other wide-open ranges with minimal tree cover. They are commonly seen perched on poles or fence posts.

Mystery Macro

Weather in Arizona – usually temperatures are described as warm, warmer, hot, hotter, or real hot. So far this year, though, warmth hasn’t been a factor here at all. With that thought in mind, can you guess what these close-up photos are?

The top photo is frost on the fabric top of a convertible.
The middle photo is frozen rain drops on the shark fin antenna of the same car.
The bottom photo is hail as it fell onto our patio table.

I’m not complaining about our Arizona cloudy, cool, sometimes rainy weather though. Our home in Canada is just coming out of ‘Deep Freeze’ mode. Wind chills have been in the -40°C to -50°C range. Sure glad we’ve missed that…

Bird Quotations

A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.
– Dixon Lanier Merritt –

Bluebirds have taught me a few things. First, the more you think you know, the more you have to learn. Second, never say never because they will fool you every time! Third, they have taught me to stop sweating details in my life and learn to enjoy the simple things. There are things far greater than ourselves out there, going on unnoticed right before our eyes.
– Malinda Matsuko, Bluebirder, 2005 –

Despite their having one wing trimmed, some ravens do in fact go absent without leave and others have had to be sacked. Raven George was dismissed for eating television aerials, and Raven Grog was last seen outside an East End pub.
– The Ravens, Tower of London –

Eagles may soar in the clouds, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.
– Jason Hutchison or John Benfield –

GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird’s intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an “author,” there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl’s thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.
– Ambrose Bierce –

If you feel the urge, don’t be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What do you think wild geese are for anyway?
– Will Rogers –

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt –

I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don’t know what to feed it.
– Steven Wright –

Owl took Christopher Robin’s notice from Rabbit and looked at it nervously. He could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn’t Wednesday, and he could read quite comfortably when you weren’t looking over his shoulder and saying “Well?” all the time…
– The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne –

People who say that an anorexic “eats like a bird” have clearly had no experience with bluejays.
– David J. Beard (1947–2016) –

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
– John Ruskin –

Robins have an extremely high rate of nest fidelity. I know “nest fidelity” sounds like an investment group, but it actually means that robins regularly return to the same breeding site each season.
– Bird Watcher’s General Store –

Since it’s the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.
– Author Unknown –

Smaller babies may be delivered by stork but the heavier ones need a crane.
– Author Unknown –

So, little snowbird, take me with you when you go.
To that land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow
-Gene MacClellan, “Snowbird,” sung by Anne Murray –

That reminds me, a salt-water crocodile, a great white shark and a Canada Goose walk into a bar…
-Author Unknown –

The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.
– Gary Larson –

You’ll have a lot more respect for a bird after you try making a nest.
– Cynthia Copeland Lewis –

We like to praise birds for flying. But how much of it is actually flying, and how much of it is just sort of coasting from the previous flap?
– Jack Handey, Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy –