- William Hunton
I Went for a Walk: Early Spring
Wow, it’s been a while since I posted. With holidays, flu running amok and among us, and other things, I have not had a moment to spare.
The last public photo show I did until this month was probably ten years ago. I decided that was too long. I had too much work that no one had seen and a lot of old work that few remembered. So I decided to show. Better yet, I decided to show with my daughter. We have a small father-daughter photo duet on view. I’d rather promote her work than mine at this stage of my life.
I think she is an excellent photographer. In 2014, she went on a year long mission trip to eleven countries. Each month was a different country, culture, and challenge. In Swaziland, she built buildings for a children’s home. In Thailand she and her team tried to persuade young girls to leave sex trade. In Nepal they work village to village to persuade the people not to sell their relatives into slavery.
It is a tough world out there folks. Not to get on the soapbox too much here, but anyone who thinks this country is bad really is ignorant of the struggles a very large majority of the world go through daily.
She took photos of the year with a smartphone and a tiny Fuji all-weather camera. They show a lot of personal depth and growth. As the year progressed she abandoned the tourist shots for the intensely personal ones of the people she met.
But I digress. I’ll post images from the show. If you are in the Atlanta area, take a trip to Smyrna and to Rev Coffee Roasters, one of the best coffee shops in the metro area. Our photographs are hanging the entire month of February.
What I intended to share here are some pretty pictures.
You don’t always have to be socially conscious; I think “woke” is the latest term for being aware of the struggles here and in the world. The word does not imply action, merely being aware.
Okay, but it is an early spring in Atlanta. Flowers are blooming and it is not even the middle of the month of February. Temperatures have been on a roller coaster; seventies one day, forties the next.
Jonquils and daffodils are blooming. There is an ornamental tree full of pink blooms. I saw it the other day while driving home. I thought I’d grab a snapshot of it with the community center in the background.
When I got in close, I could see hundreds of honey bees gathering, working, bloom to bloom. It was as if they’d never seen so many blooms before in their little worker bee lives… which is probably true, they hadn’t. Worker bees don’t have much longevity. If bees get excited, I think they definitely were. So I got in amongst ’em. Crazy, right?
A couple people walked up. One guy came pretty close and asked me what I was photographing. Then he saw the bees and quickly backed away and headed to his car.
An Asian woman and her mom approached. They spoke no English. She wanted a photo of them together with the tree and the geese which were grazing there in the park. A couple of motions later, she handed me her iPhone, also with no English written, and I managed to hand her back a couple memories.
The bees did not bother me at all, and believe me, I swell up like a watermelon if stung. I did not care. I was in the zone, so to speak, and the thought did not cross my mind until now. I was just happy to see some sign of warmth. The honeybees are even better.
They were darting here and there. There was no way I could catch them. So I had to anticipate where they would be. Still, I probably took a hundred exposures to get a half dozen images that were half way decent enough to share.
Pesticides have decimated them. But that day, there were hundreds in the tree. The groundhog was right. It’s an early spring.
Enjoy.