Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
It’s gone quiet in the kitchen. The Coal Tits have fledged and we feel a bit bereft. Is bereft something you can qualify like this? Can you be very bereft?
‘Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone’
or
‘Catch your dreams before they slip away’
The lyrics of Ruby Tuesday never made sense to me but what a melodic and catchy song it is. Perhaps it’s not anthemic enough to feature in a global top 50 of the best songs of all times if only because The Rolling Stones probably have a dozen other contenders. It’s one of my favourites and another is Angie.
I did something with my camera the other day for the very first time. I set it up to take time-lapse photographs over a period of just under fours hours. The subject was a pair of Coal Tits nesting in our kitchen flue. The law, including the Wildlife Act (1976) mandates a special licence from the National Parks and Wildlife Service in order to photograph an active nest. I would not be photographing the nest but I would be photographing the opening to it. So, just to be sure, I carefully avoided any disturbance to the birds by setting up the camera many metres from the opening of the flue.
I chose my Fuji XT3 as the camera because it has an electronic shutter and I set it to silent operation to minimise any potential disturbances.
I was mounting the camera on a tripod anyway and I set that up many metres from the back wall of the house. I selected a Canon 70-200 mm lens which is designed for full frame sensors and becomes 1.6 times bigger when mounted on the smaller Fuji sensor. So the images would photographed at the equivalent of 320 mm.
Mounting a Canon lens on a Fuji body requires an adaptor and my Photodiox Pro Shift EOS-FX(RF) adaptor, though excellent, has no pass through electronics. Thus there could be no electronic control of the aperture; the widest aperture of f/2.8 would be used by default.
The back of the house is north facing and there is no direct sunlight. The deep shade f/2.8 should be fine. Except the depth of field would only be 2 cm. Maintaining a bird in focus, no matter how small, would be a challenge, a hit or miss.
These restrictions are quite a challenge when coupled with the speed these little birds move at. Freezing the action was going to require 1/8000 s in deep shade. I had done an experiment a few days earlier from 15 metres with a 960 mm lens and learned that 1/4000 s wasn’t fast enough to freeze the action. A few tests at 1/8000 and 1/10,000 s worked quite well so that decided me on 1/8000 s.
To best manage the scene’s luminance, with the restricted light and a fast shutter speed, there is only the one variable left: the sensor’s sensitivity to light or ISO. That’s the noise level and I’d have to deal with that in post-processing in Lightroom.
To save memory, I saved the images as square JPGs (each 7.8 Mb) rather than RAW sensor readings (30 Mb) for later development. I’d have no problems storing 4 hours of photographs.
So I set the camera up some 4 metres from the entrance to the flue, hidden in a wisteria plant. Once I focussed as best I could, I set the ISO to range between 800 and 3200 as the light changed.
Then I set the intervalometer to take a photograph every second while I went socially-distant shopping. I had to choose a second as the shooting interval because the two parent birds make about twenty sorties per hour between them and each delivery of food takes about a second. They are quick getting in and out of the flue not least because there are attentive predators lurking all about.
I removed the camera after nearly 4 hours and it took me about 30 minutes to review all 14,161 exposures. No more than thirty had birds in the frame. And thankfully, there were three I could use. 14,161 / 8000 s isn’t a lot of time. I expected a few more photos but I was content to see the insects that they carried. What more could I have expected from 1.77 seconds of bird watching in the space just 2 cm in front of the flue?
When George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘all great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska), he wasn’t concerned with innovations. Yet there may be a parallel that enables hindsight to adopt this phrase to another purpose.
Perhaps memory failure has an advantage. After all, the knowledge human memory holds will expire. Our certainty is rooted in our fields of endeavour and I think that like oaks, knowledge grows with our effort and because of it. Keeping with that analogy, if the tree avoids the wind, lightning and drought, it will live for centuries. But eventually it will have to be replaced, perhaps after re-purposing.
I have enjoyed reading about the new things we know of dinosaurs. The idea that birds have two-way lungs and pneumatic fenestrae amazed and astounded me. It makes so much more sense than invoking high oxygen levels as the enabling factor for the huge sizes attained by some terrestrial dinosaurs. And to think we’ve all seen birds do this double breathing and had no idea. Received and perceived wisdom should come with caveats and expiration dates.
There is an acacia tree in the front garden across the road from the Woodbastwick Road Junction in London’s SE26. I’ve seen it in full bloom in early March while I was walking London’s Capital Ring. Between Sydenham and Penge, it is adorned with bright yellow balls that appear light as feathers and grouped together into a conical habit. A tree that dresses to impress. A tree that’s worth seeing.
The day I saw it, it reminded me of the acacia in our back garden. An equally impressive tree that is generally purple. It sometimes shows greenish or yellowish or grey or brown. But as I said, it’s generally purple. We’ve recently shaped it into a topiarists ball. Once it was a wonderful place for two cats to hang out but they’ve moved on and now it’s great song perch for garden birds.
