Weekend was for (editing) the birds

I take a lot of pictures of birds.

Just ask Ray Cooney.

It’s a standing joke in the newsroom that when Ray comes in on a Monday morning after an uneventful, no-breaking-news weekend, he’s sure to find a bird photo in his email.

I can’t help it.

I love birds, and I truly enjoy photography, so the bird pictures are pretty much inevitable.

A handful of them make their way into print. I got a nice shot of a hawk over by Dunkirk last month, and there was a great egret at the Loblolly last week that popped up on the front page.

When that happens, it’s a sure indicator that there wasn’t a whole lot of earth-shaking news locally, at least not news that lent itself to photography.

(On the hawk photo, I have to make a confession. I identified it as a red-shouldered hawk, but it might have been a red-tailed hawk. The two look very much alike, and unless I get a good view of the tail I have to just make a guess.)

There’s only one real problem with taking a lot of bird pictures, and it’s the same problem all of us have in this remarkable age of digital photography.

That’s keeping track of all of them.

Ask yourself right now how many pictures you have on your cell phone. Dozens? Hundreds? More than a thousand? And that’s not even counting the selfies.

We save the pictures because we like them and because digital technology makes it easy. And then we tend to lose them. Or forget about them.

Facebook enthusiasts — I am not a participant in that particular rabbit hole — may feel they’ve done their bit when a photo is posted and shared with several thousand “friends.” For the rest of us, there’s that question of how to manage the abundance of storage.

My camera has a card — the size of a postage stamp — that can store 32 gigabytes of data. To someone who recalls when computer manufacturers boasted about data memory measured in Ks, that’s astonishing. A megabyte used to be a big deal; now it doesn’t get you into the dance.

But over the Labor Day weekend, I got the urge to attempt to bring some order to the chaos. There were something like 8,000 pictures on that 32 gigabyte card, with plenty of room for more.

I decided I wanted to gather up, file and preserve the best of my bird pictures, the ones that still make me smile whether Ray published them or not.

That sounds like a chore, but I actually enjoy photo editing. I get a kick out of looking at a dozen or half a dozen pictures and narrowing down my — highly subjective — choice for the best one.

It took time, but it was fun.

And along the way, I added other wildlife to the mix: Bunnies, a frog, a water snake, a turtle.

Birds dominate the collection, and among those there are plenty of sparrows. But there are also grosbeaks and cardinals and nuthatches and chickadees and mourning doves and great blue herons and gulls and sandpipers.

Final count on the file of my favorites was 72.

And using a nifty software on my iMac I was able to put those together into a slideshow with a musical soundtrack.

Very cool.

The question is: Should I show it to Ray?

••••••••••

Editor’s note: No.