A Chinese proverb says all gardeners know better than other gardeners.
All I know is that gardens are sources of wonderment in all seasons, sites and scales.
Meantán gorm 
Lasair choille
birds
Not Just Another Book
Imagine imagining publishing a book that would sell for £16,500 per copy. I mention ‘per copy’ lest you think that’d be the price for the whole print run. Yes, The Sistine Chapel is a brand-spanking new, limited edition, three-volume book available now from your nearest Callaway Arts & Entertainment supplier. I’d ask ‘wtf’, ‘why’ and ‘who’ but I think you probably beat me to it.
Fuji X-T4 | Sigma 150-600 F5-6.3 DG OS HSM | 225 mm | 1/1000s | f/16 | ISO 3200 | handheld
I took this image earlier today. The low angled morning sun turned the roiling green sea to jittery, jingly, shimmery brown. The wind was howling so I used the Dun Laoghaire pier wall as a shield. I set the aperture to f/16 to maximise the depth of field, set the shutter to 1/1000 to minimise the shake with the big lens, handheld on a windy day. Then I overexposed the distant lighthouse with an ISO of 3200. And hoped the two image stabilisation technologies – OIS in the lens and IBIS on the sensor – would do their thing.
[Read more…] about Not Just Another BookOn Becoming Four
‘I read the news today, oh boy.’
One million are dead from Covid related illness and we’re going after half a million sharks for their squalene.
‘And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh.’
Death isn’t the end in Romania. A dead man was elected as mayor in a landslide victory. Is it a coincidence that this is the country of Dracula and Frankenstein?
Coastal Fishing
Pity the fish.
Hemingway was long presumed to have exhausted his creativity when he produced a novella out of the blue, so to speak. The Old Man and the Sea was first published in just one edition of Life magazine which sold 5,300,000 copies in two days. And that’s today’s story, a tale of five million likes in just a few 1951 days and zillions more since. Not bad for a book the literary critics say is among Hemingway’s least significant works. Perhaps that became easier to say after he had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature on account of books like The Old Man and the Sea.
While on the subject of pity and fishing, here are seven photos of fishing activities and the like around the coast here in South County Dublin.
Other People’s Words
Other people’s thoughts often provide the focus for my own musings. And I’ll admit that there are many days when I think that other people’s words convey my thoughts better than I can express them for myself. Today has been one of those days.
Bird Migration
Jetting from London to Houston, with noise cancelling headphones isolating me from both a snoring neighbour and the rumble of our propulsion, I imagined a Bantu throwing a spear at a stork. I also wondered what it was like in 1822 when no one could imagine a White Stork making an annual round trip after breeding in Germany, going south of the equator in East Africa to avoid European winters. At that stage in our understanding, the ancient Greek idea that birds turned into fish for the winter was still popular.
