The joy of playing with images and words and seeing the natural world better

Sometimes I feel like we slouch toward our primordial selves and become more visual than literary, favoring cave drawings over the written word, Instagram over crafted paragraphs. For those who only know visuals, paragraphs are words formed in sentences around a central idea.

In my humble view "A picture is worth a thousand words" is hype perpetrated by photographers trying to favorably compare their one captured image over the thousand words honed by a writer. OK, sometimes the photographers might be right.

I know Mark Kasick was last weekend.

He sent a scene from Calumet Harbor that he shot last Saturday near sunrise from Steelworkers Park on Chicago's Southeast side. In the photo, two guys are fishing for smallmouth bass together and the elements just came together for a classic scene.

For serious photographers still reading, Kasick shot the scene with his Nikon D810 with a 70-200mm zoom lens attached. He zoomed nearly all the way. He shot it at an ISO of 64 at F8 and a shutter speed of 1/800th of a second.

"I don’t know them but I told them I was going to send you the photo to maybe use," Kasick emailed. "They were happy with that idea."

I was happy the idea of Kasick sending the photo, too. I about fell over when it arrived. Not that I should have been surprised. Kasick sends cool photos related to the outdoors often enough that I look forward to emails from him. He has photos on flickr.

While I was pondering how to best use an image like that, an email came from Michael Jacobs, who reaches out sporadically with notes and photos himself.

"I was fishing Cal Harbor Saturday morning with my neighbor's son Steven Herrndobler when a photographer took a photo," Jacobs emailed. "He simply said he was sending it to you. Was hoping for a look at it. Hope this finds you well. Thanks in advance."

So I forwarded the photo to Jacobs and asked if he could identify who was who in the photo.

"I’m in the front, been taking Steven (neighbors son) for last couple of weeks before school started," Jacobs replied. "He’s just getting into fishing and lives it. Here’s a few that we caught."

The young man obviously has the fishing bug from the photos Jacobs sent of Herrndobler happily holding largemouth and smallmouth bass.

When I told Kasick, he replied, "Oh, cool! Did you let them see it? . . . I'm 100 percent sure it would make an awesome gigantic print. It was a Dad and his kid right? I couldn't see with the sun glaring at me."

When I told that was even neater, a man taking out his neighbor's kid.

I'll give images or photos this, they have an immediate punch with impact.

While all this is going back and forth, I had my own interaction with the impact of photos.

While volunteering on a prairie restoration, we noticed what looked like a monarch butterfly. Well, I quit spading out sweet clover and stalked close enough to get a good photo. I should have been tipped off that it wasn't a monarch when I could get close enough to get a good photo. That meant that it probably wasn't a monarch. I have a years-long history of not being able to close enough to monarchs for a good photo.

After I took my photo, I showed the others on my phone and steward Beckie Green pointed that it was a viceroy butterfly, the monarch lookalike. She noticed because of the line on the lower part of the wings, which indicates a viceroy. Still it was a good photo, though it meant I remain stuck at one monarch for the year.

For some reason that afternoon, I was inspired to find a photo at Jacobs sent nearly four years ago. In October of 2020, Jacobs caught an iconic scene of an angler casting for salmon at the Amoco discharge in Indiana with the Chicago skyline in the background.

"The gentleman in the photo and I had a language barrier and I couldn’t give him the picture," Jacobs emailed at the time. "I was retying some baits and looked up to see that. Grabbed my phone and snapped a pic."

Maybe, just maybe, sometimes a photo is worth a thousand words.