Whilst out on a little walk in the abandoned parts of Northtown in Guntersville, Alabama, we come across the birdwatchers.
Not any birdwatchers, mind you, the Alabama Ornithological Society.
Evidently there is an extremely rare bird in Guntersville right now. Its a Snow Bunting.(Click here to see about it.)
Anyways, they were very nice and slightly eccentric about birds… like birdwatchers usually are.
But it occurred to me: nobody had a camera. The things you see here in the photograph mounted on tripods are huge high-power spotting scopes and binoculars – not cameras.
These people actually came out – some drove a LONG way – to come and SEE a bird. They did not photograph it. One group of ladies drove up after we had been there a few minutes and said they were from Birmingham. They had driven an hour to come see this bird. They subsequently got back in their car and drove back.
The thrill comes from seeing a rare thing. They can see all the photographs of it in the bird books if they want. To see it in the wild, that’s enough. Its not stuffed in a museum or in a cage somewhere pickled in a zoo. Its alive in the wild.
Stay tuned…
-Noah D.
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PS: A few other photos from the day.
The abandoned parts of a city fascinate me. Imagine what it would be like to have a train station in Guntersville… that’s a age long past. I love trains. I love train travel.
I love shadows.
I process black and whites using film response curves and special formulas to get the effects of film. I wonder, sometimes, what certain frames would look like on real film. Like the tones on the light pole… the detail in the shadows is what its all about.
