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Mollymawk

This is a White Capped (I think) Mollymawk, photographed  about 5 years ago. A group of us hired a boat and went about 10km off the coast, near Moeraki, to fish for blue cod. I'd gone on similar trips several times before, and as usual we caught our limit of cod (30 fish each, or about 10kg of fillets)  within a couple of hours. And also, as usual, the boat was surrounded by albatrosses, 30 or 40 of them - the big royals with their 3 metre wingspans and these petite little chaps  with their mere 2 metre reach - who hung around hoping to steal the fish from our lines or, as a consolation prize, to scavenge the post-filleting remains.

The past slips away taking with it all that once seemed important. The things that remain are those which, whether we knew it at the time or not, somehow touched our souls and  therefore live on into our present. The fish were all eaten years ago. I can't remember the name of the boat, nor the name of its skipper or even his face. If I work hard I can bring back the early morning drive to Moeraki and some of the people who joined me on the boat. What remains is the sight of the huge birds, wheeling past the boat at 20-30kph in a 10kph breeze, dipping a wingtip into the sea to act as a brake in a precision turn and gliding to a halt about 2 metres from the tip of my rod to glare at me - a temporary intruder in its kingdom - from under those haughty and expectant brows.

Photo: Nikon D300. Nikkor 18-200 @ 130mm. 1/320 f9 iso200. Sometimes everything goes right. I cropped a few mm off the top of this shot to get rid of a tiny piece of another bird intruding into the frame, but otherwise this is exactly as it came out of the camera.

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Craig McLanachan. said…
A lovely combination of image and text which does great justice to both. Good to see an image 'as is' , I usually try to pretend I am still shooting slides that require everything to be right in camera. To be honest I lack the skills and interest in major computer based alterations. Light, the Painter, has been important to me as a direction of intention.
13 November 2018 at 08:53
Kelvin Wright said…
I guess I think of it in the way I first learned photography, when I spent 5 minutes in the darkroom for every 1 minute spent with the camera. Now the ratio is different but the time spent on the computer would be at least equal to camera time. The problem is that the technology - either film or digital - is nowhere near as good as the eye/brain combination, so that what I see and what the camera produces are never ever quite the same thing. So the work is to try and reproduce, so that others can see it too, what I saw in the first place. Im very aware that the digital medium differs from print film in terms of colour representation and dynamic range, so a lot of what I learned making prints has got to be adapted. I never took enough slides to know if this is true of slide film, but I suspect it is.
There is also the fact that computer graphics is an art form in its own right, and making something wonderful - that may or may not look like the original picture it was based on - out of pixels can be as creative as making something out of canvas and paint.
But whichever way you cut it, I can't repair with software what is missing in the original - focus, bad composition, exposure that is so off that nothing can be salvaged from shadows or highlights... so, I always want the best RAW file I can manage, and the more I use my software, the more I find myself taking pains over the original shot.
13 November 2018 at 11:38
Kelvin Wright said…
...and in learning the most intrusive digital technique there is, HDR, I find myself going back to utter basics - camera on a tripod, careful spot measurement of shadows and highlights, double checking depth of field, all that stuff...
13 November 2018 at 11:42
Alden Smith said…
Great photo. Pristine white and shades of grey on a deep blue sea, combined with those eyebrows are only saved from too much seriousness by the the splash of sunny yellow on the tip of the beak.
I like the Albatross, in severe weather in the great southern ocean they 'reef' their wings just like a small yacht - ya gotta admire that.

On a different tack and regarding my old Canon FTQL camera, I found out that there is a work around regarding the battery that is no longer available. If you go here: http://www.smallbattery.company.org.uk/sbc_mr44_adapter.htm it tells you about the MR Adapter - Voltage Reducing Converter. You place an available battery within the converter which has a micro processor that drops the voltage to the now unavailable 1.3 volt battery. The adaptor is the same size as the old Canon battery and is simply put into the camera.

I also watched a couple of utube videos showing how to create photos (colour or black and white) off 35mm negatives. The negative is photographed with a digital camera using either artificial lighting or taping the negative to a window and using natural lighting. The new digital photo of the negative is unloaded into Corel Draw or any other photo processing software and processed - a good way of reproducing any old negatives you have lying around - or considering that 35mm film is still available, being able to use an old camera if one so desired and having control over the processing of the print.
13 November 2018 at 15:02
Kelvin Wright said…
I have a drawer full of old negatives. I'm not sure why I kept them, given that most of them are crap, but digitizing them all is one of those jobs you stick on a list and never quite get round to. Some scanners have cunning ways of doing them en masse, or at least 5 or 6 at a time. There was also a device that the Warehouse sold for a while, where you feed the little strips of film in one end and get digital images out of the USB port on the other end. I'd never thought of taping them to a window, but that would work. But it would all be be so monumentally tedious. We have crumbling old photo albums full of commercially printed prints, which are, as you would expect, all starting to fade now. So, maybe one of these days I should do it.
The old film prints have a shelf life of about 30-40 years. But then every format also has its shelf life. Stuff on CDs and DVDs will be readable for another decade, I'd guess. Hard drives all fail eventually. Stuff on USB drives will be accessible until the standards change for their ports, which means about a decade. Digitized stuff online should be recoverable and readable for as long as the internet lasts,or until some corporation takes it over and takes ownership of all your data, which may be a long way away, so that's maybe the best bet. But all of this archiving is just a futile attempt to escape the impermanence of all things isn't it?
14 November 2018 at 07:32
Kelvin Wright said…
...and albatrosses. I'm astonished by their aerodynamics. They glide at 2-3 times the windspeed. They do those one wingtip in the water precision turns. They use their great flat feet as ailerons . They take off from Tairoa head on the first flight of their lives and travel around the globe without landfall for about 3 years.
14 November 2018 at 07:37
Alden Smith said…
In the case of libraries and museum archives the possibility of the impermanence of their collections is a conundrum. In the case of photographs and the like, saving the machine code of zeros and ones is the only long term solution. How to do this safely over time is a problem. In terms of keeping a record of our own personal histories by way of photographs etc I guess it doesn’t matter what we do so long as we don’t get overly attached to the records or the sentiments involved.

In terms of say Christian or Buddhist theology, keeping alive the spiritual solutions regarding pathways to ultimate truth and questions of impermanence all rely on some sort of permanent message as to what those spiritual solutions are be they in written or oral form. This will be important for as long as human civilisation exists.

I have always like this well known poem which I remember from my high school English class all those years ago which sums up some of the character of impermanence.

OZYMANDIAS - Percy Shelly

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
14 November 2018 at 09:11
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