Wondering what ducks think about

One thoughtful bird
London, ON
November 2016

The day dawned bright and warm yesterday, the kind of day that makes you double-check the calendar before leaving the house because certainly we shouldn't be wearing shorts in November.

Our daughter, who now studies photography in college and has become a master of light in her own right, had been wanting to take one last autumn-color-themed photowalk with me for a few weeks now. After some unexpected road-tripping derailed our plans, we thought we had missed the best of the season by the time we found some common open time yesterday.

We were wrong.

I originally posted this picture to Facebook (here) and Instagram (here), but somewhere along the way the technical gremlins stripped it down to a pixellated mess that looked more Kodak Brownie than Nikon. I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact that I shared it out of Flickr (here's the original), so I probably have some technical tweaking to do before I try a direct-upload again.

Software/web service gremlins aside, it was an amazing day to be out on the trail. We explored London's Sifton Bog and Springbank Park, shooting as much as we could before the sun dipped below the treeline. While I spent most of the time watching her do her optical thing, I managed to capture a few pixels along the way.

At one point, we met this rather large duck - at least we THOUGHT it was a duck - and he (she? I'm no duck expert, aside from making a really good duck call when those "Windows Department" scammers call, but I digress) seemed to be posing for us.

I'm thrilled with the pics we brought home (I've shared the full album here), but I'm even more thankful that I got to spend some quiet time together with our daughter. It's a simple thing, really, but when you think of it, the simple things matter more than anything else.

Our next photowalk likely won't be filled with autumn colors, but that's never the point, anyway. It almost doesn't matter what we shoot, as long as we take the time to get out there. I hope you get the chance to do the same.

Your turn: Tell us about a time you took the time to smell the proverbial roses.