The day started with a walk by the sea. There was a haze that cleared and yielded intermittent golden hour moments of timeless beauty.
The Rat Is Outside
bird watching
On Disappointments & Birds
The weather is most of the problem at the moment. It’s been a very disappointing few weeks of weather. Persistent rain has provided enough water at a time of maximised sunlight hours to invigorate our hedges well beyond their normal confines.
The photographer in me had four excitements today. None could be enjoyed for their photography but there were other compensations to hand.
Thursday Smiled
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 SmiledGarden Birds
We have a problem in the back garden this afternoon. A pair of Magpies have gone on the prowl. The one was lurking all afternoon in and around the garden. The other patrolled on the roof, often throwing an ominous shadow onto the granite slabs that pave our back garden.
Meantán gorm 98% 
Colm couile 62% 
Lon dubh 98% 
Spideog 99% 
Snag breac 93% 
Rí rua 91% 
Feannóg 43% 
Dunnóg 77% 
Lasair choille 78%
Ireland’s Garden Birds by Oran O’Sullivan & Jim Wilson
All photos © Simon Robinson 2020
Isolationism
The day started with birds; not a dawn chorus so much as a five-alarm dawn clatter. A herring gull has taken to dawn dancing on the flat roof of our bedroom, for the third annoying day in a row. Our neighbour has seen the bird looking in her windows but here, it sounds like it’s doing a pogo though more likely stripping off the roof felt. I might need to use a selfie stick to video the action just in case gull dancing is trending.
A grandson asked a question about the colour of a woodpecker’s beak. He’s five and the request came by a voice message during breakfast. There are a few Great Spotted or Pied Woodpeckers in the trees around his home and his Dad says they’ve stopped drumming recently so maybe that’s why beaks were on Master 5’s mind.
[Read more…] about Isolationism