Now What?

Your rest area on the information super highway…

Posts for Tag: nature

"Long ago, it must be I have a photograph - Preserve your memories -They're all that's left you..." Simon & Garfunkel

Within the last several years, I’ve become interested in photographing empty seating (like chairs and benches) because there’s something about an empty seat that looks “off” to me. I know it’s not the seat being empty, per se, because a photo of a stadium with all, or even just a few seats empty doesn’t trigger anything special in me when I see it. Put an empty chair on the side of a hill, though, and that would do it. Somehow, chairs and benches seem more empty when there is only one of them surrounded by vast, or even somewhat vast, openness. Think of a bench in a farm field or a couch in a vast desert area.

So last year, I started taking photos of memorial benches in Bernheim Forest because most of them are usually not being used and they are surrounded (mostly) by beautiful scenery. Almost every bench at Bernheim has some sort of dedication plaque affixed to it describing a person or organization to whom the bench was dedicated. If I took a photo of a bench, I made it a habit to also read the dedication plaque. Near the end of Fall last year, I didn’t take a photo, but I sat in a bench to get a stone out of my hiking boot. I read the plaque when I got back up, and it was dedicated to a Steven W. Faulkenburg. I could put two and two together to realize he had been a soldier who died in battle about 1 month from his 46th birthday.

So I get up to leave, and there is another bench very close by, which is unusual because they are usually spaced far apart. Because of the close proximity, I read the dedication on that bench too. I immediately noticed that the last name, Faulkenburg, was a match with the first bench. This plaque, however, is in rough shape, so it’s more difficult to read. I can eventually make out that her name was April Dawn Faulkenburg (awesome first & middle name combination), and she had died just 3 years after her father at the age of 24.

When I got home, I did a little research to find out that Command Sergeant Major Faulkenburg was quite an individual, and there are many records of his service online. On the other hand, I could not find a single thing about his daughter, so I don’t know what could have led to such a short life. The only time I ever spotted her name was on a thank-you notice, posted among the sympathy notes under her dad’s obituary.

Now, whenever I return to Bernheim, I always look at those two benches a bit differently. Sitting beneath several Ginkgo trees that are unmatched for beauty for about 2 weeks during the Fall, they sit alone, facing each other. The symbolism is not lost on me.

I was too late last year to get the kind of photo I wanted to get of these benches, but I was monitoring the season this year in order to make a visit when the time was right. At first, I thought I might have been a few days too early, because there is still some green in the trees and they had not hit “peak gold” just yet, but the leaves don’t last long once they hit their maximum gold color, so there’s a risk of coming back on another day to a naked tree. After I looked at my photos, I think I like the touch of green in there even better because the mixture of color seems right. If I could paint (hint: I can’t even color between the lines), this would be a scene worth painting, which is why I attempted to give it a sort of painterly look.

The Ginkgo tree is thought to be the oldest, still living, species of tree on the planet at over 200 million years of age. Timeless age, meets timeless beauty and, for the Faulkenburg family & friends, timeless memories...

Through A Russian Lens

This is what happens when you take a 45-year-old lens made in the USSR, put it on a 5-year-old digital camera made in Vietnam, and hope that everything is blurry in the right places.

The lens is from a Zenit-E camera manufactured by Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works in 1977. KMW was located near Moscow, which was the host-city of the 1980 Summer Olympics. My copy of the Zenit-E was made specifically for the 1980 Summer Olympics and bears the logo of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games on its body. At that time, the USSR was second, only to Japan, in the manufacture of SLR cameras. I obtained my Zenit-E Olympic Model specifically because of its connection to the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, an Olympics in which the US and 65 other countries did not participate. Why?

The 66 countries boycotted the 1980 Olympics in response to the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, a war that was so costly to the USSR, that it has been cited by scholars as a contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The more things change, the more they stay the same…

How Way Leads On To Way...

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

~Robert Frost

Chipmunk On A Log

Slightly obscured by several sticks, I just really liked the colors in this photo.


Profile Shot

This guy was nice enough to pose for a portrait. Looks like his antlers may have been at a crime scene.

One of the transformers...

A Pandora Sphinx caterpillar. The moth that results from this caterpillar, is not much better looking...

Pileated Woodpecker

Always tough getting a good shot when they land right above you. A female Pileated Woodpecker making her way under the tree bark.