Taken: March 13, 2012 – Jermyn, PA.

Sadly the only photos I’ve been publishing are through Instagram of late. I haven’t had the time to post process any images but I heroically opened Aperture and managed to throw this one together. Hopefully I’ll find a little more time for photography and processing over the summer.

This little guy is sitting on the broken branch of a pine tree just outside our sunroom’s window that I hang a few bird feeders on. He had a particular penchant for sunflower seeds that I had on a plate laid on the ground.

First, @cdevroe removes comments from his blog. Now, he’s uploading DSLR photographs to Instagram. Talk about hipster…

— Derek Steen (@djsteen) March 23, 2012

I realize he was poking fun. But I wanted to address this topic anyway so I thought I might as well reply to him here.

Oh, and if I Twitter would allow Google to properly index my tweets I’d be able to call up a tweet from at least a year ago wherein I called people out for cheating on Instagram by uploading photos that were not taken with an iPhone. I’ll be installing Tweet Nest later to see if I can rectify this issue.

So, yes, at one point I was angry with Instagram users for sharing their DSLR photos on the app. But something has changed lately and I knew it was coming.

Two days ago Instagram and Hipstimatic (another camera app for iPhone) let it leak through FastCompany that Hipstimatic photos were going to be sharable on the Instagram network. Here is what their CEO Kevin Systrom was quoted as saying.

“It’s a step in the direction that we’re testing out. We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken.”

They’d like Instagram photos to be about what’s happening right now in your life. Certainly the name lends to this sort of network – and I’d hate to draw the correlation to Twitter’s own motto – but suffice to say – they are beginning to view themselves more as a network of people sharing photos than they do as a camera application.

So, while before I thought it was going against the creator’s grain to share just any old photo via Instagram, I now think this will be their direct intent. Sure, my last few bird photos on Instagram were not about what’s happening right now because I took those photos over the course of the last two weeks – but I’m willing to bend the rules a little from time-to-time.

I’m cdevroe on Instagram by the way.

Several birds have visited our bird feeder since we’ve moved into the new apartment. I have yet to get a really good capture of any of them though the opportunities have been there. I’m hoping to score a few before winter is over.

This particular bird, I think, is a Black Phoebe.

I’m going to try to keep doing watercolor paintings, maybe even one each week. This week I really wanted to do an owl, so here I present my fifth watercolor in this new effort; The Owl.

I tried a few techniques this time that I hadn’t before. Some of them worked out quite well, like under-shading on the Owl (probably hard to see in any of the photos).  Some of them didn’t work out so well, because I did them wrong, like the snow by using salt.  I didn’t use enough water to make the salt effective.

The salt, if done right, will cause the watercolor to separate and move away from the salt. It would end up causing a neat effect that would work well for snow, stars, or other textures. But, again, I didn’t use enough water for this to work.

There is a lot that I would do differently, if given the chance, so I’m really looking forward to my next crack at another painting next week.  Overall I’m thrilled with the way this painting came out – but there are a few subtle things (like the snow) that I wanted to add to this and I simply didn’t do it the right way.

Live, learn, move on, try again. Here are some more photos of my watercolor paintings. Next I think I’m going to tackle a Japanese sign.

Just about one year ago I posted a photo of this bird without too much explanation besides that I had taken the photo in the Tampa Bay in Florida in August of 2001. But there is a little more to this story.

What reminded me of this story was our life poster that is hanging in our living room.  Whenever Eliza and I have guests our life poster is a topic of discussion and, for whatever reason, I’m drawn to the story behind the photo of this bird on the poster.  If you follow the link to the life poster, you’ll see I’ve noted the photo using a Flickr note. So, I thought I’d tell that story here.

My brother Derrick lives in St. Petersburg, Florida – a city my family lived in a few times.  I lived there from the ages of 2 through 5.  We have friends that owned a very nice home on Tampa Bay and during a visit to their house in August 2001 we saw an egret perched on a neighbor’s dock.  I decided it’d be fun to feed the egret one of the many lizards that were bouncing through the leaves next to our friend’s pool.

Derrick caught the lizard while I got as close to the bird as possible for a few good shots.  Using the lizard as my primary means of keeping the egret’s attention – and boy did I have it – I was able to get off a few good photos of him.

I sometimes find it regrettable that I only had a 2.1MP digital camera at the time, but like I said in my post regarding creating a simple video podcast – you shouldn’t skip opportunities based on the quality of your equipment.

The egret allowed me to get very, very close to him and ended up eating the lizard right out of my hand before taking off.  You can see from the first photo that he didn’t even swallow the lizard before he took off and landed on a dock about 5 homes away and munched away.

Photography, for me, isn’t always about getting the best shot but about the stories behind the photos.  I’m much more interested in the stories that happened before, during, and after a photo was taken than I am in the photo itself.

I’ll remember this and many other stories about my life because they were captured in photos.  And I’m looking forward to many more future memories caught on film, err, disk.

Date taken (left): August 23, 2001 | An Egret standing his ground in Tampa bay. Date taken (right): March 23, 2002 | A beacon of safety on the east coast.