Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
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.
We were sitting eating our lunch earlier today when there was a percussive thud from the the French door at the end of the table. A recently fledged Robin hadn’t seen the glass. No immediate or obvious harm, the little bird turned and flew back into the undergrowth. Sheepishly, it seemed to me. Perhaps such a stunning might temporarily cause an avian to adopt mammalian ungulate behaviour.
Texas was almost my first thought because of the memory of a Painted Bunting that crashed into the window of my office long ago in Sugar Land. Almost the same sound today resurrected a long parked memory.
I started this series of daily journals on March 1st when my preoccupation was the preparation for a walk from Manchester to Rome. I’d already realised that the coming pandemic might postpone it. Nonetheless, since I planned to journal the walk, practice was required.
Twelve days later, I wrote that I’d been discharged from prostate cancer care but the bigger news was the confirmation, on the same day, of a tumour in our eldest daughter, that confirmation coming three days before I started the journal. There’s always an element of denial with the arrival of cancer but by the 27th journal, a strange day, her treatment had started. The treatment continues and will continue for many months to come.
We four went to a local park earlier today for a three-generational distance-separated walk. It was a balmy July day, neither warm nor cold but it was dry. It’s a place I know well as the start of the long distance trail called the Wicklow Way. The Wicklow Way is a self-guided walk from Rathfarnham in Dublin to Clonegal in Carlow some 27 kilometres long. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve walked south from this spot and indeed, I can’t recall the number of times I’ve ended my treks here. Perhaps the sum of starts and finishes is 24.
It’s a place Mom and the two kids know well because of the fields, the playground and the great recreational opportunities the huge open spaces provide. Trees, lakes and rivers are a bonus for these young explorers who were moving rocks to dam a stream within minutes of arrival.
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?
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?
