Sometimes photography seems so complicated with a myriad of competing factors in play as I search for interesting subjects and seek to capture their beauty. There is a kind of pull to travel to ever more exotic locales and to constantly think of upgrading my gear.
Sometimes my favorite images, however, are my simplest ones, like these shots of a Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) that I spotted last week in the midst of the cattails of Huntley Meadows Park. The subject is commonplace, the setting is ordinary, the composition is uncomplicated, and even the color palette is restricted.
I find a real beauty in this kind of minimalism. At its heart, photography is simple, although it requires a lot of effort.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Agree! Great post and photos!!
Thanks so much. Some days, like today, I was feeling a little philosophical and my writing is often a reflection of how I am feeling.
Thanks for sharing! Really enjoying your pictures and posts!
There’s a lot to be said for minimalism. Many of my personal favorites are, indeed, among the simplest. And, I find, they don’t often need a lot of effort. Also I’m a great fan of chickadees, too. Good stuff, Mike!
Thanks, Gary. I continue to appreciate your words of support and encouragement.
This month I am plowing through old emails, deleting and archiving them as needed. I had over 25,000 undealt-with emails in my “Everything Else” folder! I’m working backwards and am now in 2017, and found this post of yours that I never looked at. Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the chickadee images. They are among our favorite birds! So cute and polite, the way they come to the feeder, take one seed and fly away to eat it. Contrast that with the house finches, who hang out for long periods, chowing down.
Thanks so much, Nina, for your kind words. I had to do a search to find that posting and was pleasantly surprised by it. I really like my images of the chickadee and it was fascinating to see the approach that I used for the posting. As I often note, my emotional state at the moment I compose a posting often affects its content. In this case I was quite contemplative and I really like the sentence with which I closed the posting–At its heart, photography is simple, although it requires a lot of effort.
As my tai chi chuan teacher says: Tai Chi is simple, but it isn’t easy.
That is great wisdom, Nina, and so true about many things in life that we unnecessarily complicate.