Learning Curve

I’m trying to learn how to photograph birds in flight. I’ve taken so many pictures, and few if any have turned out. Today I’ve done some reading on the subject and feel encouraged; there are some things I can do, some adjustments I can make, to improve.

Meantime, I’ve been reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World, so far a very satisfying book about cultivating a sacramental approach to life. She talks a fair amount about nature, and about the need to be willing to stop and pay attention. She sounds a little bit like Brother Fowles in The Poisonwood Bible when she writes,

Like anyone else, I do some picking and choosing when I go to my holy book for proof that the world is holy too, but the evidence is there. People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay.

Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture.

I have been learning to pay attention with a camera, and it’s strange the hold it has taken on me. Who needs so many pictures of birds and butterflies and flowers and landscapes when we can look around and see them all with our naked eyes? I don’t know. But there is something about the camera around my neck that has improved my naked eyes — or improved the nerve pathways from eye to heart. I believe that God loves it when we admire his world, and I have reaped the benefit in sheer pleasure as I notice things I never noticed before.

It’s a learning curve of sorts — learning to see, and to capture what I see, and to read it. Yesterday I watched this young hawk for awhile, and it seemed to be experiencing a learning curve as well, navigating the breezes and trying to decide whether I was friend or foe. The pictures are not sharp, but even so they give the sense of the bird’s grandeur even in its indecision and awkwardness. Maybe next time, I’ll capture it better. Meantime, it’s a picture of young royalty — a red-tail whose tail is not yet red, whose instincts are not yet wise to humans, but whose symmetry and strength inspire all the same.