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Pictures on a Rainy Day
Some photographers enjoy storm chasing. They track tornadoes, ambush the lightning and rolling supercells, or fortify a hurricane post. I photograph dripping branches.
People usually take shelter indoors during rain, except to move between interiors. Birds are more tolerant of the wet.
Water is unkind to electronics. A cameraman can be forgiven for preferring the morning after.
Or one might step out at night, for soft glows and glimmers.
A photographer might even get muddy.
But sometimes it pays to attend the little things.
This post is part of the Group Writing series for August 2019 on the theme Raining Cats and Dogs. Many slots remain open.
Published in Group Writing
Lovely!
Beautiful work, Aaron.
Outstanding work.
I got caught in a downpour yesterday. I think my jeans must have weighed 20 pounds by the time I got home and wrung them out. I looked worse than that poor bluejay.
Exquisite, Aaron. Always love to see your work. Thanks.
By the way, if you want to attract hummingbirds, they love that shrimp plant. And it is one of the few plants that has never needed replacing after extreme Texas summers and winters.
Speaking of hummingbirds and rain, mine are very active during the rain. I have our feeder near the living room window so I can watch them all the time. They are a curiosity.
Beautiful photography, Aaron.
I’m so jealous! I loved watching them in CA, but we don’t seem to have them in FL. They were great entertainment!
Beautiful, indeed. There was repeated loud buzzing around dawn outside my tent, while camping in the mountains this past weekend. I thought it might be some large winged beetle. Then I was standing quietly outside and saw the source, a hummingbird.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under the August 2019 Group Writing Theme: Raining Cats and Dogs. Share your favorite story of rain, reign, and maybe cats and dogs, however loosely construed. There are plenty of dates still available. Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.
I know it’s time to put my feeder out in the spring when they buzz me on my deck. They also let me know when the feeder is low or empty. They are almost as bad as my cat when it’s feeding time.
Lots of great pictures but the water on the black leaf really stands out for me . . . in an artsy-fartsy sort of way. Well done.
I’ve been working in my garage – it’s 102 today. (Only 102!) We get a couple of inches, if we’re lucky, of rain each year. Looking at your pictures actually cooled me off.
Wonderful! It’s getting ready to rain here…I hope!
I’ll have to look into them, although it looks like I’ll have to grow them in pots and bring them in in the winter. Our hummingbirds love hummingbird mint ( a pretty little plant, new for me this year), orange honeysuckle (not trumpet vine), bee balm, and the butterfly bush.
I don’t have photos of them, except for the orange honeysuckle, which grew like stink this year:
They also like bottlebrush on the Gulf Coast.
The only thing I’m sure they don’t like is each other.
Watching hummingbirds fight is hilarious. I swear one here thought it was an Apache Attack copter, the way it would rise up from where it was hiding.
It did rain. Poured! And I went out and swung (swanged? Swinged?) on my birthday swing—last year’s present from my husband, and a very long, long, swoopy thing tied to a very high branch on one of our oak trees—-in the rain.
Okay, I’m 57. I didn’t swing all that long, and wine was involved. But still.
The brother-in-law of a suicide victim assured me solemnly that he couldn’t meet with me outdoors. It was summer, and the hummingbirds would attack.
“Is there something weird about the hummingbirds?” I asked, thinking maybe the B.I.L. was bonkers.
“No,” he said sadly. “It’s me.”
We met outdoors anyway. And lo-and-behold, within a few minutes the poor guy was being dive-bombed by hummingbirds.
“It just happens,” he explained. We had to go sit in my hot car to escape them.
A redhead? Colorful shirts? Or just a sweet disposition?
Gorgeous!
Me, too. It’s unique. And it actually enhances a beautiful thing in nature that one might miss with the naked eye, whereas I would notice the glory of the flowers and birds and branches without the photographs.
It’s my favorite also. At first, I did a double take, thinking Aaron had left the natural world, and entered a jewelry store and had photographed a diamond on its black velvet background.