XKCD.com has a cartoon up that looks at it all from their point of view. It’s tough being a Coronavirus, constantly persecuted by those sneaky humans.
Got to this via Rob Fisher’s Facebook page. It was only for his “friends”, it would seem, but I don’t suppose he’ll mind.
Maybe the Coronaviri should switch their attention to cats.
I’m not going to lie, just took this photo in the garden about 10 mins ago and I am ludicrously pleased with it.
Fox in focus, everything else not. Just what you want.
This tweet perfectly captures the sheer pleasure that we unreal photoers get from our better photos. Dilnot is “ludicrously” pleased. He knows that his pleasure is out of all proportion to the achievement, but he feels the pleasure anyway. Snap.
I now feel ludicrously pleased with that “snap” at the end of the previous paragraph, with its artfully deployed double meaning. Snap as in snapping a photo, and snap as in feeling the same feeling as the other guy, when I photo a merely half decent photo of something interesting or pleasurable. I at first merely put “I know the feeling”. But the word “feels” was already in the previous sentence and I didn’t want the repetition. So I tried to think of another word. And found the perfect one!
Here. Thank you David Thompson.
I would say that several of them are straight up good:
That one being my favourite. Blurry can be good. Very blurry indeed is, in this case, I think, outstanding. I also especially like the bird with no wings.
The thing is, with wildlife photography, every second Real Photographer on earth has given wildlife his/her very best shots, and the perfection of it all can get a bit routine.
I’m referring to this:
A herd of goats has taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno, north Wales, where the residents are in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Kashmiri goats that came down from the Great Orme and into the town were originally a gift to Lord Mostyn from Queen Victoria.
This was in the Guardian, but I only just heard about it. And I heard about it only because the Babylon Bee guys featured it in the “weird news” part of their most recent podcast, the April 15th one, which I just listened to. Listen to the Babylon Bee podcast and learn.
It’s still Friday, right? So, an elephant:
Photoed by me in March of 2016. (I’m doing a lot of rootling in the archives just now.)
The next photo is even less technically accomplished, but it does show a bit better where I saw this elephant:
This was beside the Regent’s Canal, in the vicinity of Victoria Park. But what, I wonder, might a “Kiskadee” be? I asked The Internet, and apparently it’s a bird. Two birds, actually. The great kiskadee, and the lesser kiskadee. From this concluding paragraph at the other end of that link, it would appear that boats are more likely to be lesser kiskadees:
The aggressive great kiskadee, 23 cm (9 inches) in length, is found in woodland, savannah, and wet areas from Texas and Louisiana to Argentina. Shrikelike, it drops from a perch onto such prey as frogs and insects. It also eats fruit and is known to make shallow dives for fish. Its grass nest has a domed roof. The lesser kiskadee, 19 cm (7.5 inches) long, lives from Panama to Bolivia, always along waterways. Its call is a nondescript whistle.
Blog and learn
When I woke up yesterday, I could have sworn it was Friday. And I at once did two things. I checked for an incoming email telling me when a food delivery would happen, which wasn’t there. Odd. And, I did a blog posting about a bird photo. On a Thursday rather than on a Friday, Friday being my usual day for such things.
I’m not the only one suffering time derangement. I am hearing this lots, in the course of all the phone calls with friends and relatives I am doing to stay in touch. People everywhere are losing all track of what time it is, what day of the week it is, what date it is. Let’s see what The Internet has to say. Yes, this is now an official Internet Thing:
In my case, two forces are at work. At any moment I am either absorbed in something, with no fear that if I stay absorbed I will miss something that’s coming up. In which case I lose all track of time, and it goes far faster than I expect. Or, I’m doing nothing, wondering what to get stuck into next, in which case I also lose all track of time, because it then seems to go so slowly. Combine these two things, and I really lose all track of time. All of this quite aside from the fact that I am getting old, a major symptom of which is … losing all track of time.
What is lacking for me, and for many others, is Things Which I Have To Be At Or To Pay Attention To At A Particular Time. Work. Events. Meetings. Sporting events, for real or live on TV, which are not retro-wallowing but which are actually happening now, at a definite time which you have to be aware of or you’ll miss it. And it turns out that if you lack such Events to keep reminding you of the time, which includes the day of the week and the date as well as merely whether it’s 10am or 4pm, you … lose track of time.
Hence the bird.
Good news, the food delivery has now been delivered, that email having earlier arrived telling me when to expect it. These people. Recommended to me and now recommended by me.
Taken by a friend, beside one of the Walthamstow reservoirs:
The point of showing this is that it is such a fabulously vivid and artistic photo, yet it was taken with a mobile phone.
Here’s another photo that I took myself, of a slogan that was adorning Tate Modern during the Summer of 2016:
That piece of self-important verbiage perfectly sums up how artists like to think of themselves, as leading the world. They dream up new Art things off the tops of their oh-so-Artistic heads, and the rest of us follow along behind them, changed by this new Art into living different lives.
The above bird illustrates a very different reality. And the above Tate Modern slogan ought, for the sake of accuracy, instead to read: “WE CHANGE ART CHANGES”.
We all now, all of us who want such devices (and this is very nearly all of us), have these amazing Art-making machines in our pockets, all the time. We don’t even have to deliberately search out Art-ops, the way I still like to on my photo-perambulations around London. It is sufficient that when, going about our normal business, in this case just taking a walk beside the reservoir, if an Art-op appears, it can, instantly and expertly, be captured.
This changes, for all of us, our experience of Art. Art, at any rate of this sort, has now become something that we can all of us do for ourselves. (And if we don’t have time to photo pretty birds, we all of us have mates who do, and the technology to be shown their efforts.) Which leaves Artists, who once upon a time used to earn their living by making pictures like the above bird, even more unable to compete than they first were, when photography was first invented. At least then Artists could switch to being photographers. Now, they have more and more realised that mere pictorial beauty is a business in which they simply cannot compete. They have consequently moved towards such things as political sloganeering, not just because they and their friends are becoming more politically opinionated. They have always been politically opinionated. The change for them is that shouting their politics in their Art is how they can now still hope to scrape some sort of living.
I expressed similar thoughts on this and related matters, in this rather wordier Samizdata piece. (Good grief, that was seven years ago.)
I’m still, as yet, going on quite long photo-walks. These are combined with shopping and a lot of exercise, the latter being even greater now what with public transport being off limits. There is plenty, since you ask, of social isolation, far more even than is usual. Nevertheless, I still fear that the photoing aspect may soon attract the disapproving attention of authorities, formal or informal. Too little shopping. Insufficiently strenuous exercise. Too much enjoyment. We shall see.
But in the meantime, yesterday afternoon, I checked out, again, the now stalled progress of the new apartment blocks that Frank Gehry has designed to go next to the Battersea Power Station. Last time I tried photoing these, the weather let me down. Not yesterday. Trouble was, the light was coming from behind the buildings I was most interested in photoing. But there was so much of it bouncing around that even though starting out from totally the wrong direction it was still a great improvement on the earlier trip, for photoing that Gehry-weirdness. Which I may or may not get to blogging about.
But as always, on a successful photo walk, the official destination was only part of the story. When I took another look this morning at what I had, I realised that, in among all the beautifully lit photos I photoed pointing one way, with most of the light coming from behind me, were photos like these, with me pointing the other way:
I’ve photoed that amazingly tasteless sculpture of the naked woman pointing herself forwards at the front of a boat, but this is by far the best photo of her I’ve ever photoed. The secret? Added cranes and roof clutter.
Also in the category list below is other creatures. Spot the other creature.
Blogging as I just was about romantically linked birds, I recently transferred a posting about a couple of geese, which I did on Christmas Eve 2014, from the old blog to this blog, which was a big improvement because this posting featured thirty three photos of the happy couple, and viewing them is now a whole lot quicker and easier than it was.
Here is the photo number one of that clutch of thirty three …:
… and I really recommend you check out the other thirty two.
On Tuesday afternoon, at my end of Vauxhall Bridge, on the left as I approach it, I checked out the very same spot where I had photoed all these highly recommendable photos. Perhaps I thought I would meeting the original objects of my photography back in 2014, again. And rather to my surprise, I did encounter a couple of geese who looked very like the two I had originally photoed:
Sadly, I fear that “looked very like” is as far as it went. I had hoped I might have spied again the original couple, but this I now greatly doubt. There are now many of these geese in London and they breed fast.
I know this because I finally managed to identify what brand of bird these four birds all are. I googled “brown eyed goose”, and everything became clear. They are Egyptian geese. That’s a link to a Guardian piece about these geese. The Guardian loves them because the warmer weather we’ve been having lately has enabled them to flourish here. The Guardian loves warmer weather. Warmer weather, to the Guardian means that the world ought to have done to it permanently what the Coronavirus is only doing to it temporarily.
I wrote here earlier about my fear of embarking upon any longish photo-expeditions, given the highly regulated nature of the public realm at present, and given how enthusiastic mere people seem to have become about enforcing these new rules, by shouting at those who they believe to be disobeying them. Such fears are a getting old thing.
But on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons of this week I set aside these fears and went on a couple of walks, keeping well away from other people of course. On Tuesday, the last day of March, I walked from my home to and across Vauxhall Bridge and then walked a little along the far side towards Battersea, at which point it got too dark and I turned back for home. And on Wednesday, the first day of April, I turned right along the north bank of the River until I got to and crossed Chelsea Bridge, explored all the frozen-in-the-moment building activity around the Battersea Power Station, and then walked back home along the south side of the River and back across Vauxhall Bridge.
The weather on Tuesday was fine, but on Wednesday afternoon the short-term weather forecast was something it very seldom is. It was wrong. I was promised a couple of hours of partial sunshine, but this never happened. But at least there was, as also promised, no actual rain, and once embarked upon my journey I pressed on, for the exercise you understand.
I soon arrived in a place variously known either as St George’s Square or Pimlico Gardens. Although, follow the second of those two links and you understand this muddle. Pimlico Gardens is the small bit at the southern end of the much bigger St George’s Square, which is elongated and not square at all.
Anyway, what with all this exercising, it seemed pointless not to do any photoing, given that nobody seemed to be objecting. In St George’s Square/Pimlico Gardens I photoed a couple – truly a couple – of ducks:
Ducks close-up seemed to work in the gloomy weather. There’s lots of detail for the automatic function to grab hold of, which is mostly how I do my focusing.
No social distance between them.