Posts by ChrisW
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Mid-June before sun-up. The yellowing leaves are thinning so better imitated with wings spread. And the willow log is shorter, increasing the pressure on perching space.
The little shag with its wits and wings about it is ready to defend its spot from a more elegant and manouevrable black-backed gull. (Which it managed successfully - gull and its mate took the No.2 and No.3 perches). -
A reflection back to late May, when the willow log retained its full length and variety of perches (before hooked-up flood debris on a falling tide broke the outer end off). And when there were green walnut leaves for black-backed gulls to imitate.
Would seem a shame to put this one upside down.
Ah well, I'll give it a try ... -
A white-faced heron, perhaps in better imitation of a larger walnut leaf. Somewhat unusually it chose one of the light outer branches of the walnut to perch on in the dawn light. I wouldn't have noticed it had I not heard it floundering around after crash-landing.
Dignity restored.
Of course I meant to land on this branch!
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It's a wintry day. I could repeat the grey-brown river through the grey-brown branches of the walnut tree, but instead to hark back to the late afternoon sun a few days ago - this one of sparrows (and a chaffinch) perhaps imitating the now-gone leaves of the walnut tree, though if that were so they are upside down. But in the absence of reflection, that's thread-fitting too - and this through the glass door from inside out.
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Rainbow? Blue sky? Those imply the sun. Nothing cosmic like sun, moon or stars here today, and the river has lost its reflective surface somehow.
Rafts of green debris floating by are aquatic weeds from beyond the tidal zone, upstream on the Flats.
Having cleaned out the drains, the river brings down heavier debris - one gull at least checking out this piece for any opportunities.
Not even any tide to signify the cosmos today - the rise in freshwater flows neatly compensating for the falling ocean level. -
The gang of five arrive to disturb the peace
of contemplation.
‘Ninety’ swims through on the inside
to take the lead.O will Ninety succeed
in reforming willow
in her own image? -
On the riverbank,
Spring tide in June
in communion with the cosmos -
a question-mark
or is it a pipe?
hangs over the veracity of this image …Ah, imagination,
per verse
in verse
and image. -
Thanks Hebe, and Chris.
And Jos - that Ohiwa Harbour one looks ready-made for a souvenir plate and bowl set. Also seemed familiar in a roundabout way - and found it back in mid-Summertime, when I sussed out the public walkway Ohiwa Track to that marvellous-looking spot and put it on my to-do-some-day list. -
Capture: Upside Down, Inside Out, in reply to Hebe,
Half sphere !-)
That "tiny glow of back-lighting" is the earth-shine I referred to - here on a more zoomed image from the previous lunar cycle, full image and cropped enlargement.If you imagine yourself standing in the middle of that mostly dark hemisphere of the moon facing Earth, at that time just before sunrise in NZ (or just after sunset in the case of the New Moon), then it would be night time but you would be seeing the brightness of a Full Earth, much bigger and brighter than a Full Moon here. So here we see the night-time part of the moon in the light of that Earth-shine bounced back to us.
In my photo of the old moon reflected in the river, I like it that that the light I'm seeing as the pale part of the moon's hemisphere is a tiny proportion of the sunlight that fell on the mid-eastern Pacific, Americas and Atlantic Ocean, bounced back towards the sun but was intercepted by the dark night-time face of the moon, bounced back to this edge of the Earth hemisphere facing the moon, to hit the calm surface of the Taruheru River to reflect coherently (upside down, if not inside out) to my eye and camera lens, finally captured!?
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Next morning against a brighter sky so seen in true proportions - this really was the last day of the waning crescent moon, before it was overpowered by the brightening sky of -
sunrise, and then replaced by the New Moon.
