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Nature Photography Day 2024
Tomorrow is Father’s Day, so Happy Father’s Day to all the amazing dads out there! But guess what? Today is Nature Photography Day, which is a perfect opportunity to celebrate the beauty of the great outdoors. Why not grab your camera and capture some stunning shots of nature? Enjoy the day!
Happy Father’s Day
My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me. ~Jim Valvano
Like many people, I like my dad. He has been a lifelong constant, someone to look up to and emulate. He did the whole dad thing exactly right.
Is he perfect? Is anybody? Nobody’s asking for perfect, but on the grand scale of dads mine gets particularly high marks.
Did he do anything special? Was he one of those smothering helicopter parents who dragged you to a million activities to ensure you got enrichment?
No.
He was there.
My dad was always there in exactly the way we needed him to be. He went to work. He came home and had dinner with us.
Sometimes there were day trips on the weekends. Sometimes we just hung around the house and watched stuff on UHF. Sometimes we had a week away at the beach or a long weekend at a campground. Whether we stayed or went, he was there. He wasn’t just occupying space. He was genuinely there with us, playing games, watching shows, talking with us, being a good guy..
Whenever we went to visit friends and family, he was there. He mingled and was sociable. He demonstrated how to be a decent person just by being himself.
Who could ask for more than that?
Thanks, Dad. I love and admire you more than I have words to say.
Nature 📷 Photography
Master landscape photography with Joe Cornish
Something else I’m particularly grateful for is the beauty of my neck of the woods. Just driving around on errands or heading out for groceries, I’m genuinely blessed.
We have such breathtaking scenery around here. Forested hills and mountains. Rolling swathes of farmland. Serene grassy fields, festooned with wildflowers.
It’s all there on the way from here to there. Sometimes I might take it for granted or gloss over it if I’m all in my head, but I try to remember to actively appreciate it.
Another marvelous thing we’re blessed with is the change of seasons. I know some people enjoy the tropical life, but I’m nuts about the cycle.
Bare trees and snow eventually give way to buds and sprouting crops. As much as I detest the heat, I love driving past fields of tall corn and blowing wheat. The change of colors as the leaves begin to fall is an annual work of art that I’d hate to have to do without.
In and among the verdure, we have a splendid variety of species. Chipmunks and squirrels, deer and bears, foxes and groundhogs. songbirds and raptors all go about their business as if we didn’t exist.
I’m not compelled to take pictures. That’s not how my mind works. If I did, I’d certainly have more than enough subject matter to choose from. Simply drinking it in is enough for me.
In The Frame
Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts. ~Garry Winogrand
Framing is everything. What you show in your writing is what you deem to be of importance to the telling of the story. There’s always more, but a lot of it winds up on the cutting room floor.
That’s part of the reason I’m interested in writing the Collateral Impact anthologies in tandem with each of the books in the Sentinels series.
My superheroes have their own thing going on, but some of the normal citizens of Empire City deserve some of the focus in their own frame of reference.
It’s typical in an action story for the background people to have shocking experiences, but they’re really just there to sell the pitch of the action.
For instance, when somebody opens up on a crowded street trying to shoot the main character, you see people running for cover and screaming.
There’s almost always a crying kid sitting in the middle of the street who needs to be scooped up in the nick of time.
Particularly, there’s a scene in the Fantastic Four that is completely a throwaway gag (pun fully intended) to kick off what becomes a classic comic book style throwdown.
Fantastic Four – Fantastic 4 Vs. Doom
Even without superheroes, you might have cops & robbers, spies, a vengeful vigilante chasing down his nemesis. The high-speed car chase leads to all kinds of mayhem.
Top 20 Best Car Chases in Movies
For action sequences, it’s just incidental visual noise that hypes the excitement. Twisted metal, explosions, shattered glass, merely set pieces in terms of the movie.
In terms of the real world, that could be the worst day of someone’s life.
I’ve been clipped in traffic. I spun entirely around at least once as I was bumped off to the shoulder while the person who hit me continued causing chaos until her car gave out.
It wasn’t as traumatic as it could have been for me, but I had to burn a vacation day and Kelly had to come pick me up. It was disruptive and definitely not fun.
But really, what about the ladies who got their car tossed at Dr. Doom? Will their insurance cover something like that? How did they get home? That is a story in itself.
Those are the kinds of things I’d like to cover in the Collateral Impact companion works to each of the Sentinels books.
While I want to explore what it means to be a superhero in an otherwise realistic world in the main series, I’d like the short story anthologies to explore what it means to have superheroes in that world.
That’s the big picture. The novels and the anthologies will have different framing, but still take place in the same world. I don’t need to do that for Tales Of Olde Auringia or Far-Flung Reaches, but it’s pretty interesting for the superhero genre.
That’s it for this Flag Day, Nature Photography Day, Father’s Day weekend. There’s something there for just about everyone. I hope you’re enjoying it.