Rite of Spring

Trying to photograph the shorebird Spring migration has become an annual ritual for me even though I long ago resigned myself to the fact that my pictures will never capture what most attracts me to the shore line. Of course, if I actually knew what that was this blog entry would have been up several days ago and not sitting in the rewrite pile for several days. I always find it harder to write when I don’t know what I want to say.

There is some ineffable force that draws me to these migrations. I feel it when I’m there, but the more I think about it the less sure I am what it is that I feel. I suspect biologists would say this compelling force is simply a manifestation of the urge to reproduce, which it is, of course, but it seems much more than that.

Whatever it is, it can’t be caught in traditional photography. There is something chaotic about it that refuses to be captured by even the fastest lenses. Point your camera at a flock and it’s sheer luck if one of the thousands of birds present is in focus.

shorebird migration

Of course, biologists might simply point out that traveling in large flocks is a powerful defensive mechanism and it’s easy to see the protection that a large flock offers against predators in the photographs. It’s virtually impossible to pick out a single bird and focus on it.

Even at a considerable distance it’s impossible to keep the whole flock in focus, much less keep them in the camera frame.

shorebird migration

No doubt this is a “bad” picture by traditional standards, violating all the rules I used to try to teach my yearbook photographers, but in a sense it captures “reality” better than a photograph following traditional rules would. When a flock flies by this closely, it is just a blur no matter how hard you try to follow it.

It’s only when they begin to land that you realize just how diverse these flocks really are,

Shorebirds landing

usually consisting of several different species,

 Dowitcher, Dunlin, Western Sandpipers

though this particular flock was less diverse than others I’ve seen, consisting mainly of the larger Short-Billed Dowitchers, medium-sized Dunlin, and smaller Western Sandpipers.

It seems truly ironic that the only time I can get a “good” picture of the migration is when a bird pauses to stretch it wings for a moment, becomes an individual,

Western Sandpiper

no longer a members of a flock. This individual beauty is a part of the whole and part of what attracts me, especially as a photographer, but only a small part. It’s unlikely I will ever get better shots than I’ve already gotten in past years, but I’ll still be coming back for years.

Despite seeing it over and over, I’m still awed by the birds’ flights. How can take that many birds take off and land in unison? Who, or what, decides when they take off or when they land? Surely a flock this size can’t have a single leader, can it? What keeps them from flying into each other? If that many cars started up all at once and accelerated like that you’d have to spend months hauling them away.

If I were truly a Transcendentalist, I suppose I would see it as a manifestation of the Oversoul, that Divine force that penetrates Nature. If I were truly a Taoist, I would probably see it as a manifestation of Chi.

Hope These Were Worth the Effort

Besides simply not wanting to lose a whole day’s shoot, there were some specific shots that I wanted to recover when I spent a whole day recovering photos I had accidentally deleted. The ones that stood out were the shots that I’d managed to get of the Black-Bellied Plovers on my first day.

Black-Bellied Plovers, particularly when they’re in breeding colors, are notoriously shy. Unlike most shorebirds they don’t probe in the sand, head-down while eating. Instead, they rush from spot to spot, looking for food. In a sense, they’re never preoccupied with eating like most other shorebirds.

This one, though, almost seemed curious. Although it kept his distance, it stared at me for a long time and cocked his head whenever the camera shutter clicked.

Black-Bellied Plover

It stayed relatively close for quite a while so it was possible to several shots from different angles,

Black-Bellied Plover

and even get a shot of it with another Black-Bellied Plover that wasn’t yet in breeding colors.

Black-Bellied Plovers

Though I didn’t specifically remember these shots

Dunlin and Sandpipers

I was glad that I didn’t lose them as they’re quite different from anything I’ve ever managed to get at Bottle Beach. I’ve never seen this grass there before, and have certainly never had the chance to get a shot of Dunlins and Western Sandpipers taking shelter from the wind there.

Dunlin and Sandpipers

I really liked this shot, though it really demands more than 620 pixels of width.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Digital Photography

I spent a couple of great days at the beach last week observing the annual Spring shorebird migration. Normally, I would have had some pictures up by last Thursday or Friday, but I ran into some serious problems with the pictures I’d taken on the first day — I “lost” them. More exactly, I accidentally deleted them and spent the greater part of two days trying to retrieve them, the kind of comedy-of-errors that haunts those of us who rely on digital cameras and computers to take photographs.

When I take shots while on a trip I always download them to my Macbook Air at the end of the day and review them on my computer, deleting the ones that obviously aren’t very good. Usually I do it when it begins to get dark and there’s not much else to do. It gives me a head start on editing, which takes longer than I’d like to admit. When I’m done, I delete the shots I’ve put in the trash. I thought I followed the same procedure I’ve followed over the last 5 years or so. Apparently I must have done something different, though, because when I went to download them from my Macbook Air to my Mac Pro there weren’t any photos in the folder.

After the first wave of panic, I realized that I had purchased two programs a few years ago that should have been able to recover the shots rather easily. When I tried to run the RescuePro app from SanDisk, though, I discovered that the program couldn’t recover photos on the main hard drive, only from secondary drives. Turns out that’s true of most, but not all, recovery programs.

So, I turned to a more expensive and more sophisticated program, Disk Doctor’s Photo Recovery app. Since I had the serial number from when I’d purchased it, I thought I’d just transfer it over to the Macbook Air and run it from there. Should have been easy, right. Nope. Didn’t work at all. When I tried to run it it ran a message stating that the program was configured to run on only one computer. Not sure if that means I have to buy a new program every time I buy a new computer, but I do know I wasn’t happy and probably would never buy or recommend the program to someone else.

Well, when you’re working with computers there’s usually more than one way to solve a problem. So I figured that I could just hook my MacBook Air up to my MacPro and run it in Target mode, which makes it act like a hard drive. Seemed easy enough. After all, I’d run my old iBook in Target mode. Should have known it wouldn’t be. And it wasn’t. After digging though a large box of old computer cords I discovered that I didn’t have the male-to-male USB cord needed to hook the two computers together. When Apple eliminated the Firewire connection on the MacBook error it made it harder to link two computers together. I had endless other male-to-male cords, but no USB cord. I was annoyed, but I thought I could just run over to Radio Shack and pick up one.

Needless to say, Radio Shack didn’t have that particular capable. In fact the very helpful clerk said that despite several requests for such a cord Radio Shack had never had one, and neither did any other local firm that he could recommend . He suggested I look online. Of course, I figured it could be found at Amazon but I didn’t really want to wait four days to get it (since it wouldn’t be here until Monday.)

I went home and ordered the cord anyway, but I still wasn’t ready to wait that long for a cord. So I duplicated my MacBook Air’s hard drive on to a portable drive and hooked the portable drive to my Pro. Success. Disk Doctor started chugging away finding deleted pictures on the hard drive, thousands of deleted pictures, pictures I must have deleted three or four years ago at least. I got the sick feeling that I wasn’t going to be willing to sort through all those pictures to find the ones I had deleted from last week. It “recovered” over 40,000 photos. It would take several days, if not a week to do so.

So, I reexamined the problem and took a new approach. I decided to try to recover photos from the Compact Disks I had reused on the second day, knowing that I’d only used a small amount of space on the cards on either day. Luckily, I didn’t shoot nearly as many shots on the second day as I had on the first day, and I was able to recover many, if not all, of the shots I had taken on the first day. Of course, I took so many shots both days that I have no idea if I lost some of the best shots or not.

Realistically, I probably have as good, if not better shots from the many previous shoots at the beach. I knew that I hadn’t gotten a “drop-dead great” shot on either day so, in the long run, it probably wouldn’t have made a bit of difference if I had lost all the shots from the first day. But that seems like a defeatist attitude to me. If I really believed that I’d probably never take my camera out birding again, but what little optimism I can still maintain in life tells me that the next shot I get is going to be the greatest ever. I wasn’t going to let the computer just delete my pictures like that and not make an attempt to get them back.

I’d like to say that at least I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll never delete photos again, but I’m not THAT much of an optimist. Shit happens! Despite trying to back up photos and avoid careless mistakes, I’m sure something like this will happen again. I just hope I’m better prepared to recover them without all the hassle.

It’s a good thing that I love digital photography so much, though, because for a few days I was ready for a divorce.