My Word with Douglas E. Welch

In our experience, bird lovers fall into two general categories:

Keenly observant cataloguers like John James Audubon …

And those of us who cannot resist assigning anthropomorphic personalities and behaviors to the 435 stars of Audubon’s The Birds of America, a stunning collection of prints from life-size watercolors he produced between 1827 and 1838.

Our suspicions have little to do with biology, but rather, a certain zestiness of expression, an overemphatic beak, a droll gleam in the eye.

The Audubon Society’s newly redesigned website abounds with treasure for those in either camp:

• Free high res downloads of all 435 plates.
• Mp3s of each specimen’s call.
• And vintage commentary that effectively splits the difference between science and the unintentionally humorous locutions of another age.

Receding water levels in Spain’s Valdecañas Reservoir has exposed a stone monument dating back to between 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

Unusually warm weather produced drought conditions across much of Europe this past summer, including Spain. The lack of rain, while a headache for farmers and gardeners, has resulted in the complete re-emergence of an ancient megalithic site known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, as reported in The Local.

A Post By: Hannele Luhtasela-el Showk

It’s the easiest thing in the world to take a photo. You aim and press, and you’ve captured a moment, which in time will turn into a treasured memory. But did you know that with just a little bit more effort and barely any time, you can turn those captures into something more? Something that offers the subject the respect it deserves. Something that is a pleasure to look at even before the shimmer of nostalgia is sprinkled onto it by time, and something you’ll be proud to share.

With these five basic steps, you will notice an immediate improvement in your photos. Once you’ve started giving it just a little bit more thought, it’ll become a natural part of your photography.

Let’s begin!

Build your listening comprehension with thousands of hours of authentic language in context. After installation, you will have additional features for language learning when you watch videos on the Netflix website.

• Subtitles are shown in two languages, allowing you to compare the original audio and text with a translation in your language.
• The extension allows you to listen to subtitles one at a time, and to change the playback speed.
• There’s a pop-up dictionary, and the extension suggest the most important words for you to learn.

When you photograph an item for a marketing campaign, or to record its physical condition, it’s called product photography. This is a very specialized type of photography. While you may never be commissioned to photograph a commercial product, some of the techniques used in product photography may have relevance to your personal life.

Perhaps these techniques offer a solution to a problem many people don’t recognize – hanging on to reminders of people, places or events from the past.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

An interesting link found among my daily reading

It’s becoming more and more common for museums to digitize their collections. The latest one to join the trend is The Cleveland Museum of Art. After digitizing its collection, it made it publicly accessible online, with 30,000 images free for download and remix.

The CMA has shared the images from its permanent collection that are in the public domain open access. This means that you can download, share, reproduce, reuse and remix the images for scholarly, non-commercial, but also commercial purposes.

The CMA’s director, William Griswold, said in a statement regarding this project:

The Grolier Club, a redoubt of bibliophiles on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has no shortage of stately, book-lined interiors that scream — or at least murmur quietly — “serious collectors here.”

But the true spirit of the place might be found in an unassuming closet on the fourth floor containing an alarming, nearly floor-to-ceiling jumble of crumpled papers practically exploding out of weathered wooden crates.