Inspiration Comes When She’s Ready

This morning I awoke as usual – I quickly checked my email and then put on my Tevas and exercise shorts to take the dogs out for their walk. As I was walking down the front steps I saw a red tail hawk being chased by a much smaller bird as it made its way to a treetop right behind my neighbor’s house.  It sat up there and started surveying the land as I realized that I was just a doorway away from my camera and a cool photo of a great bird.

I never know when something will ignite the creative part of my mind, so it really helps to always have a way to fulfill that need when the opportunity arrives.  I swear that the iPhone’s camera has been a gift from the photographic gods in situations where I wish I had my camera before I realize that I do have one. In this particular situation, my Nikon was already set up with the right lens and settings to quickly capture this scene.

In this shot, I chose to frame it with a lot of negative space (the sky) for two reasons.  One was to point out that this was high up and without being able to show the whole tree, I’m able to express height by defining the very top of the tree with the unobstructed sky above.  The other is that as I composed this I envisioned it in black and white and I knew I wanted it to show a gradient sky that will push your eye back down to the hawk at the bottom of the image.

I also tried some other compositions and while I do like the following one in color, I feel that the black and white one is the more successful image.

This one was at a slightly different angle and shows a little more of the tree at the bottom of the image. I do like the color of the hawk itself though.

I went to put my camera back inside, but my wife told me there was a great blue heron at the pond nearby. So, I slung the camera around my shoulder and took it along for the walk. Here is a shot of the heron trying to look scary while my dogs barked at it from across the pond:

A little while later in the walk I started taking pictures of the flowers in my neighborhood. Here’s my favorite shot of a flower from this morning:

And there you have it. A simple mundane task that I do everyday became an opportunity to create and share. All it took was that little spark ignited by a cool looking hawk. And BTW, I did hear a song in my head when I put the camera up to my head to capture my feathery subject, but this time it was much more literal than last night’s example.

“Hello Hawk” by Superchunk

Promo_Superchunk (Hello Hawk) from Leandro HBL on Vimeo.

Oh yeah, one last thing – today marks the release of Superchunk’s long awaited (9 years in fact) new album “Majesty Shredding”. Go download it already!