lloydslensphotographyllc

Frozen In Time

Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image is titled “Bumblebee And Wingstems” and is available for purchase by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

The late summer summer sun lingers on the edge of the Appalachian forest. Noticing the bright yellow flowers that seem to thrive everywhere in my area I stepped closer. The flowers are called Wingstems. I have not been able any references that list them as being edible or medicinal. They mainly seem to be food for the bees. And the bees seem to agree with that.

I have been somewhat concerned about the lack of honeybees in my yard this year but the bumblebees seem to be rising to challenge of pollinating everything. I’ve seen more bumblebees than ever before this year. The whole wildflower plot around my home is teeming with them. I followed the one in tonight’s feature image for several minutes and she’s a very busy bee indeed.

Chance favored me as she went about her work and allowed me to freeze time for you. I love it when I can stop the wings and make the bee defy gravity. It’s said that when you experience a perfect moment that time stands still. If that’s true then perhaps we can make summer last forever.

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Moving Forward and Change

Color Photography

Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image is titled “Chelyan Bridge 82919” and is available for purchase by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

Sometimes I wonder if the road is really just a series of bridges connected by highways and byways. Symbolicly a bridge represents transition. The connection between two stages of life. But sometimes making those transitions can be a little unsettling. For those who are not local, this bridge has an intersection with a stoplight just before you get to the end on the other side. The bridge shakes and shimmies while you’re stopped at the traffic light. The first few times that I was stopped at the traffic light I was sure that the bridge would fail. It was easy to see why some people are afraid of crossing bridges. But isn’t it the same with life changes? We get out in the middle of a transition and when the ground shakes we want to back. But then if we do that we never reach our destination. Transition is how our situation improves. Reaching and crossing those bridges in life is we leave the past behind and move on to the bigger and better things that God has planned for us.

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Thank you again for your support of my page!❤

Community Is Important.

Color Photography

Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image is titled “All Together” and is available for purchase by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

The geese glide effortlessly across the lake in perfect unison. They seem to do everything together. If one breaks from the group the others soon turn to follow. They are a community and as such are always more successful together. Occasionally we’ll see one or even a pair that are kinda doing their own thing but that’s only temporary. They will soon rejoin the group.

A friend recently posted something to social media that reminded me of the story of Ishi. Ishi in his time was thought to be the last Yahi Indian. His story is tragic and he was a survivor of multiple genocide attacks in the mid 1800s. His remaining family had either died out or disappeared and he was left alone in the wilderness. Ishi wasn’t even his real name but his culture required that he couldn’t speak his own name until another Yahi introduced him formally. He was so alone that he lost his name. The word ishi was his native language for man and would have been used in the same way we would say “human male”. Ishi was very knowledgeable in the old ways. He had lived several years on his own in the wilderness. The years without his community nearly destroyed him. When he joined the modern world he was near death from malnutrition. Ishi only lived a few years in modern society due to an immune systems that was totally unprepared for European disease but if it hadn’t been for that we could have said that his health would have improved. He ate well and it was said that he genuinely enjoyed teaching others the ways of his people. In fact, it’s because of Ishi that we have traditional archery in the United States. During his medical crisis Ishi became friends with his doctor. Namely, Saxon Pope and Pope was “The father of modern archery” in the United States.

I have told the greatly abridged version of the story to make the point that the man who shared the knowledge of primitive survival with the modern world nearly starved to death without his community.

As humans, we may not enjoy the perfect unison that the swimming the geese do but our dependence on our community is just as important to health as clean air and water. No matter how skilled or strong a person is they need a community to support them and appreciate them for their contributions.

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https://youtu.be/FDcrY6w8oY8

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I’m now using Zazzle to fulfil orders. What this means for you is a secure way to place an order, discount codes & a broader product selection! Simply message me on Facebook oruse the contact form on my websiteand tell me which image you want and I’ll reply with a direct link to where you can place the order.

Thank you again for your support of my page! ❤

Life In The Moment

Color Photography

Most of what I capture in the lens is a fraction of a second. Working with such tight tolerances has given me an appreciation for how fluid a moment is. It takes less than one second for the bumblebee to disappear inside of the flower and change the entire scene. It also takes less than one second for the bumblebee to drop out of the flower and become airborne. Again changing the scene. Light changes, wind moves the subjects and with wildlife there’s a pretty good chance that the subject will be spooked and run away. All of this forces us to see the moment and react before it’s lost forever. That’s going to happen and it’s going to happen often. Action is always faster than reaction. But on the other side of this paradox is the fact that a missed moment is an event that is also constantly changing. If we become mentally trapped by the lost opportunity we’ll miss the one that follows. The truth is that it takes a lot of missed shots to learn the patterns and anticipate the next opportunity. I have come to understand that this is a pattern repeats itself in almost every aspect of life. It takes a lot of failure to learn the patterns and recognize the next opportunity in time to be ready for it. And, if you mess up don’t get discouraged because that moment will soon pass too.

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Forage Friday #24 Black Walnut

Color Photography, Forage Friday

Hello friends! Tonight’s feature image is titled “Wounded Walnut Tree”. All of the photos are my original work and are available as prints by following the instructions at the bottom of the article.

Black Walnut is a wild edible that’s familiar with most people. Theses days most of world collects the shelled nut meat from the shelves of the local supermarket. But it wasn’t really that long ago that Black Walnut was more commonly gathered from the edge of the forest.

I have a childhood memory of people with their hands stained greenish brown for days after gathering Black Walnuts. The nut drops from the tree inside a thick green husk. At this point they don’t really stain too bad but soon the husk will start to turn brown and that’s when it leaves it’s mark on the world. Eventually the husk goes soft and rots away from shell and that brings my to the main point of tonight’s post. How to process the nut.

The driveway method

Now, the driveway method is pretty self explanatory. In the old days it involved dumping paper bags full of brown husk covered walnuts out onto a driveway and running over them repeatedly with a car or truck until the husks were all torn away. If your driveway is paved it’s going to look somewhat like an abstract painting at the end of the day.

The Roof Method

I’m not sure that the roof method does anything more than help hide the walnuts from squirrels but people simply lay the nuts out on a flat roof or other elevated surface and leave them there until the husk has mostly weathered away. This is normally followed by hand peeling and thus the stained hands.

In order to get at the actual nut the formidable shell has to be broken. If you’re familiar with shelling out English Walnuts you’re probably thinking about the thin and relatively brittle shell. But a Black Walnut shell is so tough that when we was kids we used unshelled Black Walnuts as slingshot ammo. I even had bus driver that incurred major damage to her vehicle because someone ran over Black Walnuts with a lawnmower turning the nuts into golfball sized projectiles.

The most common way to shell out Black Walnut is to drill or cut out a bowl in an oak stump and set a nut inside it to be cracked with a hammer. Native Americans would make a large hole in the stump and drop a large log on the nuts.

That heavy shell actually makes it easy to separate the nut from the shell. The nuts float but that heavy shell sinks. So a bowl full of crushed nuts and shells can just be dumped in a bucket of water and the nuts are then skimmed off of the surface and enjoyed.

Black Walnut does have a bitter taste compared to English Walnuts. Soaking and roasting helps that quite a bit.

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