Life On the Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

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The  lake is frozen over again, the second time in a week. And one of MY herons is shivering beneath his feathery overcoat at the end of my dock. He was too cold to fly off, when I stuck a camera in his face. Most unusual.

The bigger a bird is, the shyer he is and has to be to protect himself. Thus, the kinglets and rosy-breasted nuthatches allow me to come almost close enough to touch them. But the cormorants and herons, ah, they keep their distance and are the first to fly off when I approach them, no matter how circumspectly.

A moment after I took this picture the fog rolled in and all picture-taking possibilities disappeared. Bright sunshine is forecast for this afternoon.

Heron and I are looking forward to it--if this is not pushing the pathetic fallacy concept farther than it will go.

Sunset time again at Lake Ketchum

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Another evening. (See two pictures below.) Sure, I admit, I've been long influenced by the camerawork of Alfred Stieglitz, a century ago, at Lake George in New York State. Ah, what he could do with simple slow black and white films, and the classic tripod. Today we have digital camera, no need for tripods, and color printers and easy-to-use websites to reproduce out images only minutes (seconds?) after taking them.

But Stieglitz is still magic, at least in my opinion. Are things too easy for us now? Is the artistry missing?

I leave this up to you. Below is the same picture as up above, but reproduced in "living" black and white. How flat, how dull,  how mundane. Stieglitz would never show it, let alone put it on his website. But wouldn't he envy us our easy use of color?

Perhaps not.

Sunrise or sunset? Could be either; this happens to be the latter

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What is friendship? Naught but a piece of string. You hold one end, I the other. Together we provide the necessary tension. One of us lets go, it becomes a piece of string again.

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor