Of Birds, Flowers and Close Encounters
One of the cool things about travel is the down time in between vision quests when you can edit and 
re-think the last couple of thousand shots. Tonight was one of those times. I found a few shots to work on, and look at my work in a little different way. I found a bird resting momentarily near the shore. Actually we were traveling by car and I had the shutter speed set at about 1000 as I do out of habit and the need to shoot on the fly as it were. I saw the bird and raised the camera and fired. This technique I learned traveling with a friend who refused to stop for anything when traveling, his mind fixed on the destination. I once threatened to write a book on how to do travel photography at 65 mph, you know how to anticipate telephone poles, fence posts and the like. Before I got too far along on that book I switched directions deciding
to write a survival book on how to sleep in a Jeep Cherokee in 20 below weather. Anyway it was great fun, and we both survived and even remain close friends. Speaking of friends — Jane — Here is another red thing for you. To explain — I love to shoot flowers as much as people, but I never remember the names of the darn things, and if I do remember the name I could not spell it to save my life. So as a joke I started calling flowers red things and yellow things and 
so on. It kinda stuck with me over the years — so there you are. Next I stumbled on a WWII Zero found in the old airport on Yap. I’m not a WWII buff, but here in the Pacific you would be amazed at the artifacts. Bunkers, unexploded ordinance (exo), ship wrecks, and downed planes dot the land and seascape. To the left is a Zero that had a way too close encounter with some very large bullets. I imagine this particular plane did not crash but rather suffered it’s fate from a strafing run. Yap islands during the war were a place that U.S. planes returning from other missions would drop any bombs or bullets they had left on board to further damage the enemy. Working in direct tropical sunlight is a difficult task for a photographer, so I experimented with infrared. The look is unusual enough that I like it better than a strait edit.
