Archives for May 2020

Howth and Now

May 31, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I wrote about what I was doing in November 2010. That retelling was inspired by a receipt that fell from a book. The revisit to 2010 had me looking at some photo albums and there I found a memory of great pain.

By coincidence, this weekend ten years ago we had a couple of our extended American family as guests for lunch. It was Sunday lunch and I decided to go back with them on the train to Howth where they were staying and then walk home. Which is exactly what I did and I got home on the Monday very early AM which was like today, May 31st. It’s a 42 kilometre marathon distance walk and you can read about the blisters here.

42 km yet to walk around to the other side of Dublin Bay.

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Saturday Thinking

May 30, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I decided to conduct a thought experiment today. I had looked over the wall of books that defends my desk and decided to chose one title to seed some thoughts.

So now I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty what I was doing on the 7th of November 2010 at the time of 19:03:53. I was buying a book in Dublin airport. Indeed, yes, a sales receipt fell out of the book I chose. I have the book in hand though no memory of purchasing it.

13 Things That Don’t Make Sense is an interesting insight into some of the modern mysteries and challenges in science. A thought provoking study by Michael Brooks from 2009. Think placebo effect, free will or the missing universe. And if you want to know more, I recommend a read.

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Muglins Friday

May 29, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I knew the rocks east of Dalkey Island as The Muglins for years long before I knew that executed pirates were put on display there. Somehow it came as no surprise that a word as ugly as Muglins was describing a place of death.

Ephemera and 50W Lamp. Three photo HDR to keep the rainbow visible.

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Thursday Smiled

May 28, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I mentioned ‘the decisive moment’ in yesterday’s post. The Decisive Moment (1952) was where Henri Cartier-Bresson formalised his idea of capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous such that the image represents the essence of the event itself.

The mere memory of the concept had me thinking of capturing a decisive moment of my own. I wondered if a walk along Dun Laoghaire pier might be the place to search out some moment among the boats, birds and the folk taking their constitutionals. I thought to take 4000 steps to find documentary shots with a personal expression of the things I saw.

And Thursday smiled on me. I found myself on the pier chatting to another photographer who chose coincidentally to also bring a Sigma 150-600mm lens, just like I did. I noticed a few simple juxtapositions that almost qualify as decisive, two relying on the distance flattening of extreme magnification. The gannet enters the water. A rod flexes in the cast of a fishing line a kilometre from my camera (the red Poolbeg Lighthouse is more than five kilometres distant). Perspective misleads as two identical ships pass near the mouth of Dublin port.

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Wednesday’s Hump

May 27, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘Don’t you like landscapes?’ someone once asked during a Tadaa challenge in 2012. Tadaa was an Instagram kind of app very popular with iPhone users in the time before Instagram took off.

Of course I like landscapes. The question came at a time when I was learning how to capitalise on the tiny lens in a phone. I spent several years on an iPhoneography mission while learning how to spot ‘the decisive moment’. Things have changed but here are five iPhone photos from 2009 that were ‘published’ on Tadaa in 2012.

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Tuesday’s Muse

May 26, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

A quote from Laozi, the author of the Tao Te Ching:
‘If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.’

Myself and my walking buddy might have had good reason to have broken from our walk towards Rome and gone to Marseille last weekend. Day 52 of the trek would have found us in Lentilles. I’m still not sure how we’d have made the 700 km diversion from the Aube which is poorly served by trains. Nonetheless, we both had high hopes that Leinster Rugby would have made it to another European Rugby Cup Final and made good on the failure to win a fifth title in Newcastle last year.

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Archives for May 2020

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