Here are those photos from the aquarium. I’m calling this one “Fish As Art”, because it reminds me of people looking at paintings (or rather one big painting) on the wall of an art gallery.
And I like it. But the favourite of the bunch has to be Yoshi the flying turtle with the winter sunlight dappling across her shell.
On an unexpectedly wet day in Cape Town, when I’d rather be doing most anything rather than writing up reports on experiments, it seems like a good time to relive the fjords twixt Flåm and Bergen. Amazing to think that this was only two months ago.
As I was remarking just yesterday: I’ve been lucky enough to have done Norway, the UK and Mauritius in the last few weeks, but suddenly find myself without any future travel plans. That would never have been a problem before, but suddenly, I feel the need to get out of here.
That may be down to the rain and the experiment reports though.
I found somewhere else with a monitor that actually works, and noted that I need to repair my monitor this evening. Or maybe it’s the video card. I need to repair something, anyway.
The photos are uploaded, but because of the seemingly haphazard and random methods I used to get them onto Flickr, they are in a seemingly haphazard and random order on there. Still, they do represent collections of pixels what I have made, so I guess that they still count.
This one, Saturday’s sunset while we were actually trying to spot the Space Station pass (we did, but it was less impressive than the sunset) is a favourite, but it’s this rather dark one which excites me most.
I wrote here about my desire to improve my photography a bit, and it was through a link to this webpage and a fair bit of tinkering in the icy cold darkness of Suiderstrand over the weekend that I managed to get that shot. It represents a 25 minute exposure, having played around with a million settings to get that far.
Given that it was so very, very cold and I was only bolstered by a sweatshirt and a couple of glasses of brandy, I’d love to have taken things further, but didn’t. With hindsight, I probably should have stuck it out and gone again for something longer. It was an incredibly clear, crisp night, with close of zero light pollution. There will be others though.
But this horribly imperfect image (it’s actually a lot more perfect than the several test shots that went before it) lays down a baseline for future efforts. As that helpful webpage says:
Like anything in photography, but the best way to learn anything is through trial and error and learning through your mistakes… Play around and experiment, it’s the only way to learn, at the end of the day there’s no harm in taking duds, that’s what the delete button is for.
I did this. I followed all the instructions. I tweaked to make the light shots darker, the dark shots lighter, and in the end I got something to build on. Watch this space, but equally, don’t hold your breath.
They’re stars, by the way. Stars.
The plan was to upload the photos from the weekend and write a blog post about them. One in particular.
But then the SD card reader went AWOL. To be honest, it couldn’t really have gone AWL, because it doesn’t get any leave. It’s an SD card reader. It has no rights.
Perhaps that’s why it disappeared.
Never mind, I thought. I’ve got a wifi SD card in the camera. Bit of a schlep, but still, it’s an viable alternative.
Unless the monitor on your computer has gone on strike after seeing the way you treated the SD card reader, that is.
Yeah. I know. Technology, hey?
So. Some photos tomorrow then.
Possibly.
I don’t pretend to be a photo ninja. I can point, and I can shoot, and sometimes the results can be pretty good. Very occasionally, they can be startlingly good, but only very occasionally. I need to work more at not just pointing and shooting to increase the percentage of those startlingly good shots. We’ll get there.
There are different reasons people (I) take photographs. Sure, sometimes you want to make art with light. To make that happen well, you need to have done the work I mentioned above. Most of the time you just want to record a scene or a moment so that you can review it in detail or trigger a memory later on. For the most part, that’s the reason I was taking photographs in Mauritius. So maybe it’s no huge surprise that there were none of the nearly 100 I have uploaded onto Flickr that I think made it into the “startlingly good” category. That’s not to say that they are all rubbish though. Some are pretty good, and all of them perform admirably at some level of recording scenes or moments and will, I hope, trigger those memories when the time comes for them to require triggering.
This was a shot that was made inadvertently better by the sudden departure of the subject, mid-snap. He’s a red-whiskered bulbul (Pycnonotus jocosus) and he was (as you can probably see) resting on the back of some patio furniture when I decided to take his photo. Given that the shutter speed was 1/60 second (0.0167 seconds), you can see just how quickly a red-whiskered bulbul can leave the back of some patio furniture if needs be. I like the ghostly effect of the translucent wings and tail feathers.
If you want to have a look at the photos from the holiday (probably not, having just read how I described them), you can. The album – featuring dolphins, sunsets, mountains, beach scenes, and some fantabulous architecture and towel art – is right here for your perusal.
Oh, and the video I mentioned in the post title? Maybe tomorrow, accompanied by some equally powerful disclaimers.