Well, this blog is about photography isn’t it?  Also about life, the universe, everything, 42…

I wanted to post this image as a reminder that persistence pays off.  I’ve grown rather fond of the many hawks and raptors that we have in Colorado.  I love shooting them, even though they can be fiendishly difficult to capture. (Dam you kestrels!)  I haven’t been out to where they live much lately, and they’ve grown wary of my presence…again.  Nothing like hauling out a camera with a huge lens attached only to see them fly away.  Of course, their eyesight is amazing, and I can only imagine what that lens must do to them when they see it.  I managed to get pretty close to this young redtailed hawk before he got nervous enough to fly away.  But apparently not nervous enough to fly right past me.  Fortunately, I’ve gotten used to this lens and am learning to pan effectively with it, and I finally have the settings on the camera dialed in that I was able to pan, autofocus and grab a few nicely focused images of this one in flight.  It’s a big beast of metal and glass, and yet strangely manageable.  With practice.

I didn’t want to keep pursuing him as he was hunting for dinner, and I didn’t want him to have to abandon the prime hunting site that he had staked out.  It’s a field full of prairie dogs, that I fondly call the hawk buffet.  Must be pretty easy pickings for them because I see them along this area frequently.  All those fat little snacks on four legs for them out there.  Yummm…..  At any rate, I was pretty happy with the few good shots I got that didn’t include power poles and power lines in the image, so I called it a day.  Mission accomplished.

Photography is like that sometimes.  We don’t always get the shot we want, or have set out to grab.  Remember to look behind  you.  Sometimes there is something there that we didn’t expect that might be way better that what we set out to find.  In this case, I got what I was after.  However, we should stay flexible, because there is always something else out there to capture in that frozen moment of time that becomes a photograph.  That’s one of the many reasons I love photography.  I count myself lucky to live in the photographers paradise called Colorado.

Life can be like that too (Ha, told you this blog was about life).  Sometimes things don’t always work out the way we want, but it almost always works out the way it’s supposed to.  Like photography, we have to be open to other options, other opportunities that we had not previously considered.  Yea, I know, it sounds like the old saying about one door closing but another window opening.  Sometimes we do have to crawl in through the window, but when we do, we find a treasure of opportunities that we didn’t consider previously  (Wait, did I just use the ‘window of opportunity’ as a metaphor without thinking of it?  I think I did…).

Well.  42 it is.  Keep  your head on a swivel.  Life is just like that sometimes.  I’ve been feeling like a window is about to open in my life.  I have no idea what it is, or where it will be, but I’m trying like hell not to miss it.