John Michael Swartz

As with most days this year, it was unusually warm. And so we were told, later on, by a very enthusiastic docent, that we might not see the elusive and reclusive Pallas's Cat especially because of the heat. However, near closing time, and with my friend needing to catch an imminent flight home, we tried again and got lucky. Lucky us. It was slow and magesterial, sought the cool rocks in the shadows, blended in but deigned to look up and out a few times. #blessed.

I had never been to this zoo, and I think it had been decades since I had been to any zoo. This, despite the fact that it is a 10 minute bike ride from my apartment, and that I bike by it regularly. And I'm often reminded that I'm biking by it because I'll hear the plaintive call of the resident peacock and try, unsuccessfully, to imitate it.

Reminiscense incoming. The last time may have been with my dad when I was home from college one summer. He and my mom had gotten yearly passes to the San Diego Zoo as part of their empty nesting. My dad occasionally got excited or fixated on very specific things. Model trains. Nissan ZXs. Guns. Neon signs for light beers such as Miller Light (his favorite). This time, he seemed surprisingly, if only briefly, enthusiastic about the new hippopatomus exhibit. I don't think we looked at anything else when we went. (I assume that he and my mom had probably already seen everything several times at this point.) Through the thick glass, we watched quietly as a bull unsuccessfully tried to mount a cow underwater. After a few minutes of this, an older woman nearby said, dryly, "She has a headache." My dad chuckled.

At the time I actually was totally unfamiliar with that idiom and thought the joke had to be funny because of the impossibility of knowing a hippo's inner state. For what it's worth, I think that absurdity makes it doubly funny, besides whatever humor there might be in thinking about how a woman is expected to politely decline sex with a man by lying, and applying it to hippos.

Back in the present. I've been lax about taking and editing photos. I've been fixated on playing cello again. It's all part of my mid-life identity crisis. However, I recently received a nice email from the Larry Lederman Photography Fellowship imploring me to re-apply for next year, owing to the strength of my previous submission. Choosing to believe it isn't merely a form letter, and being susceptible to any amount of flattery, I will oblige them. It seems to me that they have expanded the description of what they're looking for to include a lot of what I had expressed being central to my photographic interests. Specifically:

The fellowship is intended for a photographer whose practice explores landscape as a complex, evolving relationship between people and the natural world. We welcome both traditional and experimental approaches, but applicants should approach landscape as a social and cultural construct (shaped by history, use, and perception), rather than through close-up or purely botanical studies.

So perhaps they had a bit of a schism last year about whether they were more interested in the more conservative direction they had been going, or whether they were also interested in queerdos like me wanting to do underwater selfies in the Bronx River.

Anyway, I don't think there's anything spectacular going on with these photos. Maybe some of them are kind of funny or have some interesting surface qualities. I have a rather short lens and as I've mentioned at length elsewhere, I mainly take pictures of dead animals, if at all. And I've taken mediocre pictures of animals at zoos since I was a child. I think the main difference between then and now is that, as an adult, I can spend as much time looking at and photographing whatever animal I want to. What is there to see? Patience and autonomy really help to answer that question.

Poetry aside, it felt good to practice techniques to overcome the limited and weird lighting, behind glass or wire, of animals that may not be very visually charismatic, and may nevertheless be moving around a lot, with a pretty short lens. I have hundreds of pictures that I rejected because the animal was not acknowledging the camera, or because its eyes weren't critically sharp. My takeaway is that in these circumstances, I should pump the ISO to get faster shutter speeds, and use probably the fastest multi-shot mode with a pre-buffer. As it turns out, Lightroom's AI denoising is very good, making the noise above 3200 on a M43 sensor workable. It's a bit fussy, though: it won't complete if I try to do anything else on my computer while it's running and takes about 4 or 5 minutes (on my 2019 Mac Mini).

Embarrassingly, I can't really remember the names of enough of the animals to warrant putting in anything but the vaguest alt text. "A monkey. A different kind of monkey. Probably an iguana. Bird. Bird. Bird." So I won't. Two key takeaways, however: kookaburras are much larger than I imagined, and some goats look much derpier than others.