No egrets at sunrise, but I'm bailed out by silhouetted sunflowers next to a cornfield

      This morning's target photo was of egrets feeding in a drainage culvert west of Orrick. It was still pretty dark, so I cranked the camera to 1,600 ASA and hoped for the best.

     Thanks to a combination of mechanical difficulties and my own limited tech skills, the egrets -- tall, skinny birds like the one in the stock photo here -- were well enough lit, but poorly focused. 

     This was unfortunate (i.e. stupid), because the birds have been hunting fish on backwater from Fishing River (apparently the water way is well-named) for more than two months during this summer's Missouri River reservoir releases and flooding. I did take some photos of a flock of egrets earlier, but what I wanted was a shot of a single bird at sunrise/sunset with its shadow reflected in the water.

     Waiting's past full, the milk's spoiled and the cow split before I could close the barn door, if you know what I mean.

     But I'm obsessive, so I figure I'll keep trying. A few minutes after my egrettable experience (sorry, I'm tired from napping excessively over the three-day weekend), I drove past the corn field in the photo below to pull into a convenience store for my morning artificial energy (i.e. Diet Pepsi). It was there I saw the sunflowers below silhouetted in front of the crops.

     If I were an an art reviewer for the Orrick Flood Plains Gazette-Times and Oracle, I might say that the photo has "a certain graphic, two-dimensional quality, evoking a hint of autumn and Halloween, with trick-or-treaters swarming through the neighborhood like a bunch of locust on a sugar high."

      But I'll go with something simpler: After the egret disappointment, I was glad to have spotted this. When the photo God closes the door, he opens a little window (thanks, Kinky F.).