Friday, May 4, 2012

Idyllic View


There are so many little spots from where I stand on the dock that look idyllic.  Using a telephoto, it isn't that difficult to exclude the ugly and concentrate on the beautiful, which I'm always happy to do.  I don't have any affinity for photos of ugly. That is one of the reasons I like telephotos.  Anyone taking a photo should keep this in mind, however: exclude distractions from the borders of your image.

But, I didn't take this image because it was "idyllic," as my wife called it.  I simply wanted to try to identify the duck.  That is the little dot swimming in the middle of the image.  I knew I could zoom in on it "digitally" and perhaps identify what it was. That little dot is what I mean when I say, "a tear in the fabric of the space/time continuum."  It is just a little dot, but because it is in the fog, it stands out like a piece of light fuzz on dark clothing, whereas if it was up against the shore, it might look like some of the other little clumps of grass.  And that was enough to get my attention.

I expected to learn that it was a wood duck when I zoomed in on it on the computer at home, but it wasn't.  I have seen a lot of wood ducks along this stretch of shoreline the last couple of years.  Many birds can be identified by their unique outlines and, while I can't be one hundred percent sure, the most likely candidate is a member of the merganser family.  And mergansers are not a duck I have seen on the river.

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