While organizing and cataloging the photos from my last Hokkaido Photo Tour, I realized I had created a near perfect scene. On the top row of my photos were all my landscape photos of Hokkaido’s winter wonderland. Two or maybe three rows of beautiful, glistening landscapes were all laid out for me to start editing or leave for the moment while I began examining some of the birding and wildlife photography, the Steller’s Sea Eagles, the White-tailed Eagles, Hokkaido’s snow ballerinas the Red-crowned Cranes, the Ezo Sika Deer, or the Ezo Red Foxes. At that moment I realized the scene I had created. In the photo I’ve attached to this newsletter, you see a lone Steller’s Sea Eagle seeming gazing up and out of frame, but what I didn’t immediately realize is that he was immediately below all my neatly organized Hokkaido landscape photos. I wondered where his eagle eye was gazing, then my imagination took over. My experience during my 20+ years of Hokkaido birding and wildlife photo experience kicked into overdrive, and I brought every experience I’d ever had with Steller’s Sea Eagles to mind. Was he scanning, as one of my friends on Facebook, Alice, suggested deeply immersed in ‘food for thought or thinking of food’? I started poring over the landscape photos in the series to see if I had missed anything. Using my ‘Beginner’s Mindset’, I tried to look at the photos as if I had never been to Hokkaido, trying to see the landscapes with new eyes. In my immersion into visual artistry, I don’t know how many minutes, potentially hours, I had spent zooming in on the crevices of the snow-covered mountains, but when I get into a zone, time becomes nearly immaterial. Slowly pulling myself back into focus, I looked into the reflection of myself in the computer monitor, and I realized that I struck almost the exact pose as my Hokkaido friend, the Steller’s Sea Eagle. I couldn’t help but laugh.
0 Comments