Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
‘March, the month when magnolias rule our world’ wrote Thomas Pakenham in The Company of Trees, a gift last December that inspired me to test his opinion.
Our local 5 km pandemic travel radius is coast-cropped. We only had access to 37 km2 for exercising and magnolia hunting. I stopped counting after finding over 80 specimens in 26 days of peering into suburban gardens.
It’s the second World Book Day during my (not) Walking Commentary daily journaling and last year I got it wrong. I wrongly encouraged readers to celebrate an unofficial celebration. Today is the official World Book Day for 2021.
Everyone’s calendars are relative to a starting point. It’s been a year since I started this journal so it’s Journalday 365 today. Trekkies might date it as 74628 despite the fictitious origins. Then again, Star Trek on TV (74628) isn’t on the same calendar as the game played as Star Trek Online (47634). Parallax takes many forms.
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.
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 BookI 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.
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