I went into Stratford this afternoon, for lack of anything better to do, but although it wasn’t actually raining it was cold, and the light was awful. The best thing about my chilly walk along the river was accidentally putting a Cormorant to flight, and the worst thing was realising when I raised the camera that the R5 was still set up for yesterday’s indoor shots, and having to madly press buttons and spin wheels to achieve some shutter speed, while trying to keep focus on the bird. With a DSLR this would have been a hopeless proposition, but one of the advantages of a mirrorless camera is that what you see through the viewfinder is more or less what the sensor will see when you press the shutter button, so I got the settings to where I needed them quite fast – though sadly, not quite fast enough for decent photos of the Cormorant.
Happily for my mood, R was also in Stratford, where he’d had an appointment earlier in the day, and just about then he noticed on the iPhone app we refer to as Where On Earth Has H/She Gone Off To Now? that I was walking over the Old Tramway Bridge, so he phoned and asked if I wanted to meet up for coffee. And by the time we’d had coffee and a chat, and cooperated over a word puzzle, the cloud had lifted and the sun had emerged.
There are catchphrases people tend to use on social media that seriously irritate me, and one of the worst is the unbearably smug “If you know, you know” – but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like knowing stuff, and when Stratford is bathed in late afternoon sunshine I know exactly where to go to get shots of water birds against a colourful backdrop. I just need the birds to go there too, and they’re not always as helpful as I might like. Today when I got to the confluence of the river and the canal the light was terrific, but the only birds swimming across it were Canada Geese, and I didn’t want them, so I had to stand and wait for a while until some gulls showed up, and I could photograph them circling above the reflective water. The orange in the background here is the Old Tramway Bridge, the yellow is the bare willow trees on the island in the middle of the river, and the blue is the sky. I think there’s a touch of Usain Bolt about that wing position, but it’s possible I’m being fanciful.
R: L2, C4, D20.
