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Yellow Is Imperial

October 16, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

What is yellow? The autumn leaves of the Ginkgo biloba on our back deck are yellow. After a lineage of more than two hundred million years, we may have first encountered it as an occasional leaf appearing imprinted on the coal we burned in our fireplaces. You may know that botanists classify plants into five groups. You may not know that in one of those groups, there is just one curiously different, lonely surviving species, Ginkgo biloba. It seems a bit unfair that the lone-member ginkgo ended up in two small pots in my homes, one the coal scuttle of my youth, the other a planter currently in our suburban garden.

There can’t be many who keep both ginkgo leaf and the 1.5 gigapixel scan on their desktop. This is a jpg render made for posting.

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From Westminster Bridge

October 13, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

People say that Wordsworth wrote in praise of the early morning in London, saying that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. That was in 1802, half a century before before the The Great Stink changed the way London used the River Thames for waste management.

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 8, 2018
Annual Great River Race, from Millwall to Richmond.

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Photography Continuation

October 11, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

My first job found me working in Sharjah in the UAE. Thwarted for years, I carelessly used most of my fourth monthly paycheck to buy the state of the art Canon A-1 in 1979, taking advantage of the freedom from purchase taxes in neighbouring Dubai. Friends and colleagues were buying the more affordable AE-1 but I thought I’d likely hold onto the camera for a decade so I went for the A-1; future proofing was the justification for acquiring this object of professional desire, with its better viewfinder, faster shutter speeds and exposure compensation. It was worth it because the A-1 made me out to be a better photographer than I had been. And it helped that there was often more sunlight in the desert than in Ireland.

View of ice sculpted hills beyond smoggy Dublin from my office in Park House
Scan from film negative January 1980 – Canon A-1
191 N Circular Rd, Phibsborough, Dublin.

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Free Associations

October 8, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Isn’t it ironic that my brain started making it’s own free associations at a time that social free association is proscribed?

It started again when there came a pier walk first thing this morning. And with that came a waft of stale urine from long closed public conveniences.

Chelsea Physic Garden Spring Spike (available as a fine scarf from FabHappy)

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Home is Here

August 29, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Our home is somewhere in this photo, Home from Howth. I can see the gable wall peering out at me but I won’t share the exact location in such a public forum. I can also see the house where my parents raised my brother and me over some twenty five years. It’s quite something to resolve such detail across eleven kilometres of sea.

You will also see Bulloch Castle at the bottom, about a fifth of the way in from the right (or west). I also think it’s quite something to look back in time to the fortified building style needed by Cistercian Monks during the 12th century in order to protect their fishing rights.

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Reading Barthes Helps

August 24, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

We moved to the US in 1981, the year that Roland Barthes’ final book Camera Lucida was posthumously published in English translation. I had no more knowledge of this book then than I had any notion that my interest in photography would take a back seat for nearly a decade. This is neither whinge nor regret. It was simply that life, family, work and financial imperatives had to prevail.

I had already retired by the time a copy of Camera Lucida found its way to me. Indeed it was, in part, a retirement gift, intended as a torch to light the future rather than illuminating the past. Let me say that forty years after publication, I have found great insight into my own interest in photography through the pages in this book. I have come to see how and why some of the perfections that photographer friends have chased have not mattered quite so much to me.

Today On Merrion Strand © Simon Robinson 2020
Studium: Unknown Cyclist On Urban Beach
Punctum: The Tide Was Rushing In or The Bird Appeared or Fat Tyres

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