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Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

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Fake Memoir

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.

  • Gannet Arrow
  • Cast from afar.
  • Trucks Collide

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.

[Read more…] about Thursday Smiled

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: bird watching, booklink, henri cartier-bresson, pandemic, photography, photos, thomas pakenham

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.

  • Tree Spotting
    20091010 iPhone 3GS
  •  Paris Smile
    20091010 iPhone 3GS

  • Another Fluffy Souvenir
    20091010 iPhone 3GS
  • Hotel Des Invalides
    20091010 iPhone 3GS
  • Sea Walking
    20091107 iPhone 3GS
[Read more…] about Wednesday’s Hump

Filed Under: Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: centre culturel irlandais, henri cartier-bresson, instagram, iphoneography, landscape, photos, tadaa, travel, walking

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.

[Read more…] about Tuesday’s Muse

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir, ManRom2021 Tagged With: booklink, conwy, george santayana, john berger, laozi, leinster rugby, marseilles, pandemic, photos, plague, wales, walking

Monday’s Petem

May 25, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

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?

109 image gif from an hour of time-lapse photographs
Coat Tits Wait Impatiently © Simon Robinson
Inverted 109 jpeg time-lapse gif
X-T3 85 mm 1/10,000s f/5.6 ISO 3200
[Read more…] about Monday’s Petem

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: birds, black holes, photos, sourdough, sputnik

Ruby Sunday

May 24, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘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.

West of Java © Simon Robinson 2006
[Read more…] about Ruby Sunday

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: photography, photos, the rolling stones, travel, volcano

Every Second

May 23, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

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.

  • 600 mm 1/1000s f/10 ISO 3200
  • 600 mm 1/2500s f/9 ISO 3200
Two handheld shots from the kitchen window.

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?

Coal Tits on the flue
320 mm 1/8000s f/2.8 ISO 1600

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: birds, garden, photography, photos

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