By Vladimir Brezina
Copyright
Wind Against Current by Vladimir Brezina and Johna Till Johnson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Authors
Vladimir Brezina (RIP)
... kayaked the waters around New York for more than 15 years in his red Feathercraft folding kayak. He was originally from (the former) Czechoslovakia and lived in the U.K. and California before settling down in New York. He was a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He died in 2016.Johna Till Johnson
... is a kayaker and technology researcher at Nemertes Research. She's an erstwhile engineer, particle physicist, and science fiction writer. She was born in California and has lived in Italy, Norway, Hawaii, and a few other places. She currently resides in New York City.Recent Comments
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Wind Against Current 
Great pictures!!!! I have to geek out though. Camera, lens etc. Inquiring minds want to know!
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Nikon D80 with a 55-300mm lens, mostly at 300mm. Nothing really special. But the birds allowed me to get really close :-)
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brilliant close-ups, taken from the kayak?
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Probably couldn’t get anything as sharp from a moving kayak… no, it was just a walk along the beach…
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oh well done! our birds don’t let people get as close …
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Wow! Stunning set Vlad! What lens do you use?
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55-300mm zoom (see my response to quotidianhudsonriver’s question above)… Thanks, Madhu!
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WOW!! wonderful!!
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Thank you!!
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they’re all lovely; what species has the red eye ring? z
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I think it’s a ring-billed gull. Here’s a photo of the complete bird:
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it’s beautiful! thanks! z
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Wow! Great shots!
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Thanks, Amy!
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Those are amazing close ups….and I love your title :-) what lens do use?
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55-300mm zoom (see my response to quotidianhudsonriver’s question above)…
An interesting thing is that, about half the time this saying it’s used, it’s given as “Windows are the eyes of the soul”, and the other half of the time, it is “Windows are the eyes to the soul”. Quite different meanings, almost the opposite, in fact…
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White bird has those red markings around the eyes? Fantastic contrast!
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Ring-billed gull, I believe. See my response to Z above.
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Finally watched Life of Pi last night so this is very relevant. Beautiful shots!
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Haven’t seen Life of Pi, unfortunately… Thanks!
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Absolutely beautiful!
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Thanks! :-)
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Love the title, love your blog! You get really close to the birds with your kayak, that’s a gentle approach.
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These particular photos were not actually taken from a kayak, but many others were… Thanks so much!!
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Agree, the eyes are the window to the soul. Perhaps you might want to read this, A Bright Vision: http://marygilmartin.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/6830/
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Thanks, Mary—and thanks for the link: even more beautiful eyes there! :-)
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Got to love that lens of yours!!! WOW!! Spectacular!
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You’ve just got to get really close… Thanks, Cee!!
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I’ve gone back and forth and back and forth but still can’t place the eye in the whole gull. As a closeup, the eye would nicely (well, not so nicely) illustrate a science fiction story. An alarming moment in the story.
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There’s a very good reason why you can’t place the eye in the whole gull. It’s not the same photo, although it’s the same gull (I think—there were several). I must have dozens of photos of that gull. I thought that particular photo of the whole gull would better show its overall characteristics with a view to identification, whereas the first photo, of its eye with its beak buried in its feathers, is indeed somewhat sinister… Do birds even have a soul? ;-)
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Good Evening: Nice work! The extreme closeups work great in conjunction with the square or nearly square formats. Vonn Scott Bair
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I didn’t really plan it that way—that’s just the way it came out… :-) Thanks!
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Good choice of subject matter. Beautiful shots!
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Thanks, Greg! (BTW, your “Neighborhood” photos were very nice!)
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nice attention to details.
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Thanks!
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Wow sort of creepy and beautiful at the same time. An eerie beauty. Love the photos!
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Especially the last one is quite a bit creepy, I think myself… Thanks, Evil Nymph!
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The eyes always have it. Thanks for including the shot of the whole gull too. Beautiful shots!
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Funny, my first tentative title for this post was “The Eyes Have It” :-)
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Hi Valdimir! Wonderful Shots! What kind of camera do you use?
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You are not the first to ask… See my response to the very first comment above… :-)
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Wonderful shots !
I always thought that birds have frozen eyes… then a frozen, spooky soul.
Ciao
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They do—that was, in part, the point ;-)
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Wow! I have a D50 with a 70-300mm lens and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten quite that close! Very nice!
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You just need some tame birds. Actually, I take that back—these birds weren’t tame at all, but rather self-confident. They knew where the line dividing the human domain from their own domain lay, and were confident enough to do their thing very close to that line…
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Wow – truly amazing photos.
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Thanks!! :-)
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Oh wow, Vlad, these are gorgeous. That last one is crazy beautiful. xxx
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It was the last one that motivated the whole post…. Thanks, Ailsa!!
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I find your last photograph appealing for its way-off-center placement of the eye, for its distribution of light and shadow, and for the feather details in the lower right corner.
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By the way, shortly after leaving my comment I came across a photograph at
that, despite differences, struck me as having a lot in common with the one of yours that I commented on.
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Yes, I see what you mean. That’s a great photo—thanks for pointing it out!
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Yes, that last photo was the motivation for the entire post—the others were just fillers ;-)
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