not exactly a blue heron

 

A photographer friend had been after me for months to go out photographing with him so that he might help me get over my “digital camera resistance”. He converted from film to digital only last year and his zeal for this newly found mode of photographing is palpable and contagious. He has found his salvation in pixel perfection, and insists I must be “saved” as well, or forever perish as a photographer.

I began to fear he might be right, and finally agreed when he asked me to accompany him while photographing the nesting heron’s a couple of weeks ago. He is a wildlife photographer, and so if I was to learn anything digitally I would have to do it on his turf. My stipulation in going however, was that I be allowed to bring along a film camera as well, in case I saw something worthy I wouldn’t want to compromise by shooting in color digitally. (I have a real problem with seeing an image first in color that I visualize in my mind as black and white.)

I am a nature loving kind of girl, and truly appreciate and adore all forms of wildlife…….but I honestly don’t have much of an affinity for photographing them. Arriving at the location where we were to photograph the birds was incredible though, something I’d never before seen……trees literally transformed into a comical kind of heron commune, bursting with new life and industrious activity.

After trekking through the hot Florida sunshine for several hours photographing the birds, adjusting my digital camera settings and checking histograms I felt myself growing a bit weary……and those darn birds began to all look alike to me. When my friend excitedly spotted yet another blue heron family to photograph, and called for me to follow, I waved him off, told him to have at it, and I would pass on this one.

It was then that I spotted my kind of specimen to photograph…….a kid. After receiving permission to make a few images of her I enthusiastically pulled out my film camera, and felt the same rush as my friend was experiencing with his birds. I glanced over in his direction and noticed his head shaking at me, with an exaggerated look of playful disgust on his face. I could feel my own face beaming back at him, my body newly energized and no longer fatigued. I was home in my element: just me, my camera loaded with a roll of black and white film, and an honest, innocent, beautiful young face to photograph. I called back to him with childlike glee, “I’ve found my blue heron!”.

The few images I made that day of a sweet young girl with windblown hair are nothing at all extraordinary but still meaningful to me, because they signify a small slice of clarity……..a brief point in time when I was fully cognizant of what it is I love, and able to bask in the warm glow of that feeling at the very moment my finger pressed the shutter release. I was simply overflowing with gratitude.

~Cynthia