dignified, invisible / Moving without pressure…
My son, growing up in an age of pure digital imagery and ultra-cheap flash storage, never learned the economy dictated by the roll of film (and what a sneaky joy it was–as though you had pulled a fast one on Kodak– to squeeze an extra shot or two in at the end of a roll!) The result is that he takes a lot of pictures, several hundred a week sometimes, and it’s my job to go through our uploads and delete the many, many out of focus, mostly cryptic understory shots, lest we be forced to take a second mortgage out to pay our cloud storage bills.
While pruning the latest upload, which included dozens of pictures of one mostly-obscured-by-foliage Prairie Warbler, something clicked just as I was about to hit delete for the nth time, stopping me in mid-keystroke. It wasn’t a dyskinesia, it was some other unconscious application of the brakes, and in those few milliseconds of hesitation I saw something I had missed.
It was the same obscured Prairie Warbler but this frame caught the bird in flight, landing I think, or more properly, alighting: primaries and secondaries in a blurry spread, all motion, a photo grainy but strangely beautiful in its capture of an otherwise invisible, graceful moment.