Swans
As a photographer, swans ask something different of me than dogs or people. They don’t pose, they don’t perform; they simply live their lives on the water while I stand at the edge and look. At Prospect Park Lake, I watch and wait—feeling the light shift, noticing the way it falls on them and the water, the way a pair drifts in and out of frame, the angle of a neck, the lift of wind through feathers, the small sounds that carry across the surface.
I’m drawn to their shapes and their unshowy grace: the soft chaos of freshly hatched cygnets splashing near a parent, the first uncertain run across water or ice as a young swan learns to fly. Some of these details I catch in the moment; others I only notice later, at home, when the images are in front of me. Again and again, I’m reminded that experience guides me to look closely, to wait, and to be open to surprise. Each visit is a quiet lesson in patience and paying attention. What I bring home from those hours isn’t just a record of light and movement, but a steady sense of wonder at having been allowed, for a little while, inside their world.
