1stAngel Arts Magazine

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Inspiration is all around us, sometimes we just need to open our eyes. Earlier this year my mother was in an auto accident, and after a long stay at the hospital, she went home where she’s been living by herself for the past 25 years. Her kids, myself included, shared the responsibility of visiting her in Sacramento, California once a week during her recovery.

I live in the Bay Area which is about a 75 miles drive to Sacramento. On those trips back to visit her, I would sneak a side trip to the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area (YBWA) just off Highway 80 where a large number of birds can be found year round. The area is part of the Pacific Flyway and during the spring and fall seasons, migratory birds would follow the food source along this route to their breeding grounds and the number of birds in the area would explode.

The Red-tailed hawk seen in “Soaring Hawk” is a local residence there at the YBWA, living off of rodents and other small creatures throughout the year. Each time I took my side trip to the YBWA this same Red-tailed hawk would come out to greet me, or was she trying to fly away from me?

Hawks, like most birds are creatures of habit and once you discover their routine, you can rely on finding them in the same place at roughly the same time doing the same thing. This hawk would sit atop a lone tree along the East end of the YBWA scouring the landscape for her next meal. Each time I drove up, she would fly off into the distance but would always return in about 10 minutes. Realizing this, I got my camera ready and waited. As she appeared in the distance, I raised my camera with excitement while impatiently tracking her approach. And when she swooped across my line of sight, mother nature treated me with a burst of sunlight, and I pressed down the camera’s shutter button, snapping off about 5 shots at 1/1600th second each. I got my shot on that day. And with a little enhancement to the background in post process, I named the photograph “Soaring Hawk”, inspired by my mother who has always been the symbol of strength in my family. With her full recovery these days, I am happy to report that my mother is soaring high once again.

I have always been fascinated by the visual world around me ever since I was a child when at the age of five my family came to the US, leaving behind Hong Kong, a world I only knew for a brief moment in time and of which I have no certain memory of. Perhaps it was because of this visual transformation that photography became so important in my life as it allowed me to record this ever changing visual world, and which in turn allowed me to better understand and control the impact change has on my daily live.

Discovering art was inevitable to someone so enthralled by the visual world. Some of my fondest memories as a child were school field trips to art galleries and museums where each piece of artwork represented a moment in time for me that will never change for all of eternity. I studied Art and Architecture at UC Berkeley and did some painting in both oil and acrylic early on. But the process of painting was too slow for me, I needed something that quickly recorded the instant of my artistic vision which is ever fleeting. So back came photography.

These days, my camera is my American Express, I don’t leave home without it! The photographs I present at www.wing-tong.artistwebsites.com are ones that represent the art of my photography, whether it be photographs of the purity of nature, the long forgotten details on an architectural building, the fine art of automobiles, new photo creations through composites, or digital artwork from my photos – they are all part of the art I see in this visual world around me. And just as this visual world changes in an instant, my photography on the site is ever changing and evolving.

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