A thing of beauty

The Taylor Wessing 2014 catalogue dropped through my letterbox on Saturday. In it, there is an article on Beauty written by Eamonn McCabe. It is a well written article and I believe I have seen some of the images before at one of Eamonn’s talks. I had certainly heard the stories before in small group and 1:1 tutorials whilst I was UCS. Eamonn talks about the difficulty in photographing people and having that exchange between sitter and photographer to capture that look or feeling of beauty. I can go with all of that.

This morning a slightly tardy departure on my bike was down to me ferreting around to take another camera with me having shot some reference shots yesterday. The light was similar i.e. the sun had not risen as I set off. I packed the old D300 but purposefully put a prime lens on to emulate a standard lens on this cropped sensor. I stuck the Sigma 30mm 1.4 on tested a few shots, checked battery levels and I was off.

I pulled up on the Gipping cycle path just behind the Co-Op owned industrial estate as I had heard that familiar call sign of Alcedo Atthis. Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. There no more than 8 feet in front of me settled a Kingfisher. There was I, legs astride my bike, resplendent in day glow Sam Brown belt, flashing headlight and tail light and natty, speedy looking helmet with a thing of beauty, seemingly ignorant of my presence, stuiously looking out for food in front of me.

I dared not move.

I resisted the temptation to swivel the bag off my back and just watched, privileged to see such a thing. Then it was off but not off on patrol, it literally hovered at eye height in front of me , wings beating like a Hummingbird as it perused the water beneath, then it was off calling out its call sign to warn off any other intruders on it’s patch.

I can honestly say I have never seen such a thing of beauty as that ( other than my wife’s eyes).

 

A couple of shots here replicating the scenes shot yesterday. I don’t allow the D300 over ISO800 whereas when I shoot my D3S ISO 800 is my native ISO. The difference in sensor noise is that obvious. Yesterday’s were on the P6000, an even smaller sensor than the D300. Not that you will notice much other than the angle of view with these low resolution files but believe me, at 1:1 on screen it is so obvious. The splash in the water under the railway bridge was an Otter. It had to be an Otter as it swam under water upstream with the telltale air bubbles bursting on the surface. Mink tend to swim on the surface.

The limit
The splash was noisy- a belly flop if ever there was one.
ISO720 the noise is evident
ISO720 the noise is evident
Habitat mitigation
Habitat mitigation
Angle of view quite narrower than yesterday's shot
Angle of view quite narrower than yesterday’s shot

 

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