Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Moonlight And Magnolia ...



“You can drop the moonlight and magnolia, Scarlett!”
              ~ Rhett Butler,
             ~ “Gone with the Wind”
          ~ Academy-Award winning 1939 American epic historical romance film starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel of the same name.  

Moonlight and magnolia refers to the romanticization of the pre-Civil War South.

“You can drop the moonlight and magnolia, Scarlett! So things have been going well at Tara, have they?” Rhett asks Scarlett in my favorite movie of all time. When Scarlett wore a dress made of green velvet drapes to Atlanta to try and get money from Rhett to pay taxes on her home, Tara, she smiled sweetly and claimed to have everything she could hope for, and “not a care in the world.” Rhett noticed her hands, calloused from picking cotton, and knew she was lying.

I created this image by blending “In The Fire of Spring,” – a shot I took of a beautiful blossom and breaking bud in tandem in the fire of spring as sun set on my favorite magnolia tree at Trexler Memorial Park, Allentown, Pennsylvania in April 2015 – with my capture of the Supermoon over Cedar Creek Parkway, Allentown, Pennsylvania on December 3, 2017.









Sunday, April 7, 2019

Whitetail Winterlude ...


“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
              ~ Gary Snyder
              ~ born 1930
         ~ Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry, 1975
My favorite white-tailed deer doe, at right, and her fawn – now almost a yearling – pose for a mother-daughter winter portrait on a February evening at home in the park.

I’ve been blessed to photograph this doe and her fawns since 2012, and it’s a true joy to me personally and as a photographer.

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Frozen In Harmony ...


“Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.”
                    ~ Henry Williamson
                         ~ 1895-1977
            ~ English army officer, naturalist,
                  farmer & ruralist writer

Cascading waters above the Bushkill Creek are frozen in harmony with later winter beauty on a sunlit, early March afternoon at Jacobsburg State Park, which spans between Wind Gap and Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

Jacobsburg offers environmental education programs from the preschool environmental awareness programs to high school level environmental problem solving programs, historical programs, teacher workshops and public interpretive programs. Once the site where the famous Henry Rifle was made, the Jacobsburg National Historic District lies almost entirely within the park. Henry’s Woods offers very scenic hikes and the rest of the center grounds have multi-use trails.

The park surrounds the Bushkill Creek.

The original land for the center was purchased by the Department of Forests and Waters from the City of Easton in 1959. In 1969, additional land was purchased using funds from Project 70. This brought the total land area of the center to its present size of 1,168 acres.