Portrait of Greatness at Du Quoin fairgrounds

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten that moment.

For Jean Bullock, retired Du Quoin Community Unit District 300 art instructor and daughter of Gene Gallmeister and the late Dorothy Gallmeister, it is a large part of her life.

She is in all ways part of a great Gene pool.

Case-in-point is this breathtaking photograph of an American Bald Eagle on the grounds of the Du Quoin State Fair.

Jean said she was pulling back into Du Quoin from a trip to Carbondale and couldn't resist pulling into the Du Quoin State Fairgrounds,

She saw this eagle near what's known as the "big cut" that runs north from the Exhibition Hall.

"It was about 4 o'clock. I first saw him by the long cut, then he flew to a tree by the white bridge," she said.

"I came home and got my camera. He was still there," she said, but he seemed to be traveling back and forth between there and the stump pond.

"He was showing off," she said.

Like her father, Jean uses Nikon equipment and brought along her 300 mm lens to bring the eagle in close.

"He was only about 30 feet away from me," she said. And, with that kind of lens, she could fill up the frame with his beautiful head and face.

She squeezed the shutter button just before another vehicle came down the road and spooked him.

The end result was a photograph you would see in National Geographic.

Photography is about both the equipment and the photographer--but more about the photographer.

Jean is a regular photographic contributor to the Du Quoin Evening Call.

In high school she would work alongside her dad in the newspaper's engraving and graphic arts department.

"I remember he got me my first camera in 1968," she said. It was a Nikon Nikormat film camera with a 50mm lens. He bought cameras for both of his girls and they have since bought film, then digital equipment of their own.

Particularly with "smart phones" photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.

Jean makes it work wonderfully.

Thank you for sharing.