“Beneath the Eagle Tree”: Wonders All Around

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I take one profound message from Bob Kovar’s book, Beneath the Eagle Tree. I hope you won’t mind my building up to it slowly.

The book is made up of stunning photographs Kovar created over a couple of recent years during almost-daily morning walks along the Trout River, “…to watch the sun rise from under the big pines on the point where the eagles have nested as long as anyone can remember.” As you might guess, many of the images involve water.

Each comes with a date and few lines of prose that range from explanations of what he and his camera saw, to humorous and touching exchanges with a granddaughter (“Hey Papa!” “Hey what?”). Given my profession I appreciate good writing. And I admire great photography because I know what it’s like, from my newspaper days, to be only passably competent behind a camera.

No doubt at times when outdoors you encounter something so beautiful that all you can do is stop, sit down and look on in wonder. Some of Kovar’s images – actually many of them – hit me that way. And as a one-time semi-pro photographer I know this isn’t just a matter of pointing a camera and clicking a shutter.

There’s the collection of equipment – camera bodies; normal, telephoto, wide-angle and macro lenses; filters, tripod, flash units – and the complete mastery of it all. I have no doubt Kovar overrides his cameras’ auto settings and for each subject selects the aperture and shutter speed for the maximum effect.

But technical expertise is just the start. I can only imagine the patience it takes to capture, for example, the profile of a hermit thrush in full frame, the perfect twin silhouettes of a pair swans paddling in the reflection of a sunrise, a hummingbird drawing nectar from a red blossom, a full-face portrait of a red fox.

There’s patience, too, in waiting for the moment of peak color in a sunrise, the instant of perfect lighting on a hoar-frosted deciduous woods against lavender snow and sky, or panorama of fog-shrouded woods taken from a high place.

And then there is the persistence to be out searching not just during the pleasant days, but in vicious 20-below weather, in strafing winds, in rain, in squalls of snow, and going home with images worthy of frames on a wall.

Most of all, there is the artist’s eye. Kovar finds beauty not just in things spectacular, like a loon, wings beating, rising in the water to display its white breast, but in things strikingly ordinary. Like last season’s brown reeds bent over and poking into snow, set against a dawn sky. Or a sun-sparkled droplet of dew on a tiny spore capsule of moss. “Full disclosure,” Kovar writes. “I had to wait two hours after the sun rose for the frost to turn to turn to ‘dew.’” Did I mention something about patience?

And that brings me to the lesson, my take-away if you will: It often requires an artist to show us the wonder we can find all around the lakes and the environs we inhabit daily. It’s always there, if only we get out into our world and learn how to look. Find out more about “Eagle Tree” at www.bobkovar.com