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DAVE WROTE: Hi Jim, Here are some pictures for the blog. It has been the poorest fall migration I have ever experienced in all my years of birding. Other than at my feeder set ups there are no birds on our property or the surrounding area. It gets very discouraging when we travel around looking for birds and not finding anything in areas where I know  I should be finding  birds.  Dave

Last night the clouds over TGO were remarkable.

Dave wrote:  Hi Jim, Here are some pictures for the blog. The last batch I sent was of Ruby-crowned Kinglets. I mentioned that we had another species of Kinglet the Golden-crowned. Well here is a shot of a Golden-crowned  Kinglet that showed up in my yard. Also some Bluejays with colored leaves.  Dave

I am studying Premier Pro – I tried to write a visual story. I wanted to tell you what bad things may happen if you hassle wildlife with your drone.  Learning to make good story videos will take me months – maybe years!

I found I needed to get the video file down to 100 MB. YIKES.  Had to cut a lot out and still try to tell the story!   I will show you my first attempt:

I have tremendous respect for folks like our own Doug Jensen when he gets to display his videos on CBS’s Sunday morning show.

DAVE WROTE: Hi Jim, Here are some pictures for the blog. Ruby-crowned Kinglets. We have 2 species of Kinglets in the US the Ruby-crowned and the Golden-crowned. They are  very small and very active birds. They come thru my area in the spring and fall. Here are a few shots.  Dave

I stood by various tents at the art show – eavesdropping on potential customers. Without exception, they talked of how it would fit the room and the message they saw in the art. Hanging in their home it would tell of their hobbies, their family, their interest in wildlife, boating, etc – to them it was a way of saying something they wanted to say to folks entering their room.

That inspired me to do the unthinkable.  Take a photo of a piece of art, use PhotoShop to change it to tell MY stories – send MY message thru art.  I did not feel comfortable sneaking a photo of art hanging in a booth, so I ask Gloria if I could do the unthinkable to one of her’s.  She said sure, “Here is one I have been practicing on”.  THANK YOU GLORIA!” I made 5 images showing MY message. First, Gloria’s original:

Animals have been a major part of my life – even now that I have given up all my farm land, I have tons of photos of my domestic and wildlife animals friends. I have been thinking how to title their photos – here are a couple of my attempts:

DAVE WROTE:  Hi Jim, I  know I haven’t sent you any pictures in  a while. It  has been pretty dead here in upstate NY. The decline in the bird population is ongoing  at an exponential rate. The fall migration is almost non existent. I have been doing this for 65 plus years. I have birding journals going back 50 plus years. Here are few shots a Cedar Waxwing, a fall Bay-breasted Warbler. Two young buck deer behind our house. Strangest of all a young moose about 10 miles north of Rome, NY. We don’t normally have moose in our area. Dave

My wife says in my old age I should go find a safe hobby: – “Not like those hobbies you had when you were young – boats, wind-surfers, motorcycles, airplanes, horses”   So, I am going back to learn more about photography with Remote Controlled  Airplanes, Drones, and Adobe Artificial Photography:

If I were a professional photographer, I am sure I would set up my photo shoot and I would know what I was shooting.   But, I am not a professional, I am an obsessed iphone snapshot photographer.   If I see something that makes me smile, or say “WOW”, or makes me  wish you were here to see it with me, I grab the phone out of my pocket and snap a photo.

Often, when I look at the photos next morning, I see things I never expected to see. Sometimes I see only the the thing I want to show you but the photograph is terrible. Composition is poor,  focus is terrible, color and tone just don’t do it.

I have included a couple of each of those kinds of photo.  Another one of my photograph hobbies is to start with a photo and create, with Photoshop, an abstract art image.  I included two of those also:

The way I live, I enjoy trying new hobbies and learning new things. These last months have been interesting.  I have been studying the evolution of us – Homosapiens.

Some researchers have a theory that somewhere around 30,000 years ago we, by pure chance, had a segment of our brain DNA mutated. Pre-mutation we had a language, we could tell those around us there is a tiger down by the river.  But if we wanted to organize to go attack it with clubs we could not do that.  We could only communicate about tangible things and an organization is intangible.

Our original brain was not geared to think about an intangible organization. It could not think about a group with a leader to get us convinced that we should follow him/her to attack the tiger. Post-mutation we were able to talk about intangible things like feelings, organizations, and inequalities where a member was a leader – someone special. Post-mutation we could even believe in intangible spirits – thus religion was started.

In summary, things that did not exist began to control our lives. Good control if we made spirits happy but watch out if you angered the spirits.  Kings even started to exist – Bring me the best food and carry me on a litter and I will keep the spirits happy.  The world changed. The Homosapiens could now live in groups with government and religion’s rulings.  Some researchers believe that new ability to organize is how Homosapiens  were able to  drive all others to extinction.

Even the art changed due to the mutilation.  The paintings on the cave’s walls started to go beyond figures of horses and bulls – they showed surreal abstract art of spirits like human bodies with animal heads and visa versa.

Oh, what does that have to do with you and me?  My studying new things about our evolution lead me to study cave drawings and energized me to experience PhotoShop to create, each day, at least one abstract-surreal art piece which I must show you. That is what it has to do with us and the way I live:

Please read the next paragraphs and learn how to have compassion, not worry, and be happy .

I like to do “street” photography.   I roam the streets of NYC and secretly snap photos of people doing what people do in NYC.  

In my last post, I showed you where I got caught photographing a person on the street. He/she was  searching through garbage.  I was photographing her and the garbage because the garbage was blocking the driveway.   By the driveway was a “NO PARKING” sign.  The sign was saying do not block the driveway by parking there but it said nothing about blocking the driveway with garbage.  I found that funny so I whipped out my iphone camera.

The person searching the garbage caught me, gave me the finger, and “Mooned” me.   In addition, this morning I read about a street photographer in Melbourne, Australia getting caught doing street photography.  The person that caught him attacked the photographer and beat him up.  

I do not want these two instances to scare me away from street photography so I said to myself – “Why not continue photographing on the street but pick safe subjects. Flowers won’t get mad at you for photographing them!” – or will they?

Another thing I read this morning was, “A Harvard study found that decorating with a fresh bouquet of flowers led study participants to feel more compassion for others, experience less worry and anxiety, and develop fewer feelings of depression.”  They found in other studies that bright colored abstract paintings on the wall had similar effects.

So, my mind said WOW, go do a new kind of street photography.  Use colorful flowers as you subject.  If they catch you photographing them they won’t beat you up & you can look at the photos and have compassion, not worry, and l be happy.  With PhotoShop you can even turn them into bright paintings.

Here are a few photos of my new kind of street photography: