“The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands

I’m in the midst of a couple of very time consuming projects, along with this being our busiest season of the year for Casa S, so haven’t been very good about posting. I’ll be back to regular missives soon. In the meantime, a couple of photos from my last trip to Colonia, and wandering through the nature preserve along the shoreline.

A bird in the hand may be worth two in a bush, but how much is one bird in a bush worth?

It likely sounds bizarre, but one of my first photography hobby projects was a series of photos of dead trees against the skyline. I took dozens of them, and only a few worked out well. Of course, this was back in the days of rolls of film, and I was a student, so I was a bit more judicious about snapping shots hither and thither. One of the pluses of the digital age. Still, one of those photos, along with a photo of a Trillium (flower), helped me graduate from the University of Michigan – a very sympathetic course advisor, having called me in a month or so before graduation, informed me that somewhere in my five years at college I’d missed taking a class in creative arts of any sort, part of the core requirements. In discussion, she asked about my hobbies – I told her about the photography I’d been doing – she asked to see some prints, I brought them in, and she took them to whomever the powers may have been at the time, and they gave me credit for the photos in lieu of the course. I had a couple of 16×20 prints made of her two favorites, framed them, and gave them to her as a gift at the end of the term. I ran into her about ten years later and she told me she still had them hanging in her office. I’ll have to dig those out and scan them in… I wonder if they were really that good….