Duck Digest, 8/3/22
(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want help me buy a new camera lens, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Also please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.)
A pigeon, at Waterfront Park in Portland. Earlier in the week I saw a pigeon drinking out of a benson bubbler, cast in expressionist lighting from the beautiful setting sun. Unfortunately I forgot to put a battery in my camera, so I could not capture that perfect moment for other people, so I will have to hold onto it for myself with my imperfect memory. Some people say that seeing pigeons drink out of Benson Bubblers lowers their incentive to drink from Portland’s iconic always-running water fountains. I welcome communion with animals, though, so it spurs my incentive whenever I am walking down the street and I am feeling a little parched. We are all one: the Terran collective, floating together on this spaced out rock, waiting for the end, and I celebrate that.
Without anyone asking, I have made myself the in-house still photographer at Faded Portland, a monthly comedy show organized by Shain Brendan and Sean Jordan, pictured above in a handsome high contrast black and white. This week I forgot to format my SD card before shooting, and had to figure out some way to create more space for my camera on the fly. Blessedly, there are also videographers at every show, shooting for Youtube or whatever, and so I asked one of them for an SD card. He helped me out, because he respects the Code of the Camera, the social contract that everyone schlepping a DSLR abides by.
The card he generously loaned me wasn’t really big enough to finish out the night (RAW files are big!!!), so eventually I opted to do something even weirder: take the 64-Gig Micro-SD card out of my phone and stick it in the adaptor that my much larger Micro-SD is usually nestled in. Unfortunately, I did not have a pin or a paper clip to stick in the little home that has the little button that pushes the little tray where you put your phone’s SD card and SIM card out, so I started quietly asking around. Hey, do you, the person next to me, have a paper clip? A staple? No. No. Of course not. Please leave me alone, Corbin. You are much too large and distracting to be a photographer at a live event.
I started to get weird with it. I took a medical mask out of my bag and removed the plastic strip with the wire in it that is supposed to fit across your nose. Using my teeth, I stripped the plastic off, exposed the wire, and tried to push that in: not enough resistance. So I folded the wire over, sacrificing some lightness for girth. Unfortunately, it was not girthy enough, and it mushed up in the hole, leaving my SD card sitting there. I went inside the restaurant whose patio they have the show on, and I said hey, do you have a paper clip? He said no not at the register but in the office, yeah I think. So we went back to the office and he dug one out and it did the charm.
The light got very low as it got later, and I was doing spray-and-pray shots with a remote at a 1/15 second exposure time. I got so slow-shooting minded that I slowed down my aperture to its lowest setting and shot a few shots for like five seconds, so that it looked like a ghost was doing stand up comedy in a North Portland brewpub. Please know this photo is not proof of the spirit’s persistence in the great beyond, it is just a long exposure. What would a ghost do stand up comedy about, I wonder? “Fellas, don’t you hate the regrets that tie you to this planet, keep you from entering the place of judgment where your place in the afterlife will be determined?”
The other night my friend Conor told me I should take the pictures of ducks off my Hinge profile. Here is my response: I do not like pictures of myself, but I do like pictures of ducks, and I think any paramour I was looking to entice would feel the same. One lady sent me a message that said “Hey, actually, I don’t want to date you at all but I just wanted to say I really like the pictures of ducks,” which was probably the most successful interaction I have ever had on a dating app. Okay, I guess I did once date someone for like a year after meeting them on an app but that was disappointing sooner or later, while this was just a purely positive interaction. I told her to follow me on Instagram, not so I could hit on her, but so I could have more Instagram followers, who could see the nice pictures I take of ducks and other birds. I do not believe she has, yet which is her loss.
Thank you for reading this week’s Duck Digest. I will be back soon with a post about a lady who posts about fruit on the internet.
You arrive at this pond and you see this Mandarin duck sitting alone. How do you open?