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1/640 of a Second

Yesterday I spent about half an hour down the road at the inlet with my camera. I then spent maybe 2 hours at my computer looking at and processing the light I had gathered. Down by the waterside, I was looking through a window approximately 1 cm square, down a long metal and glass tube at a bird which was about 12 metres away and moving quickly, so until I got the picture up on the screen I didn't know exactly what I had captured. I knew what I hoped to get: the beauty of these ungainly birds and the stillness of the late morning and the constantly changing web of life into which the fish and the spoonbills and the mud and the water constantly weave themselves. But it was only later that I could see the shapes and textures of the feathers,and the way the bird and its reflection formed an oval, interlocking with the ring on the surface of the water, and the subtle vertical lines of the falling droplets.

So I trimmed the image, emphasising shape and form, cutting out the things which might distract, tweaking shadows and contrast and exposure to get the details as clear as I could. Some people modify their images so much that they are doing a kind of digital painting, producing from their camera's data something which arises more from their imaginations than it does from what was actually there. I hope I'm not doing that. I hope I am helping people see what was there. Yesterday the inlet was all around me. With the light and the breeze and the moving clouds and the birds, it was a visual and kinesthetic and olfactory and auditory experience, and here in two dimensions, on the screen of whatever device you are using to looking at this, I am hoping to suggest all that.

It's also for me a sort of prayer.

The photo above took 1/640 of a second for the camera to make. Which means, that in the space of one heartbeat there were another 639 pictures the camera didn't take, each of them as beautiful and interesting as this one.And I was down there for a lot of heartbeats. And, then, there were the other 11 spoonbills in the inlet at the same time, that I wasn't watching. And the gulls. And the cormorants. And the teeming life of the water and the mud. And the light on the hills and the soft blue Dunedin sky. All around me was more beauty and power and elegance than I could capture in a lifetime. My camera takes one tiny, pin-prick moment of all that and reminds me that the beauty and power of God is everywhere and always present, and that it is me and me alone which stops me seeing it.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
- Gerard Manly Hopkins

Photo: Nikon D750. Tamron 150-600 @ 600 mm. 1/640, f8 iso 160. I set the aperture to f8 which is the sharpest point for this lens, and the shutter speed to 1/640 - fast enough to capture the motion of the bird and water, but not superfast, so as to allow as low an iso as possible - I was hoping to reduce noise as much as possible. My camera handles low light very well. The light is similar this morning, so I might go back and try a similar shot with faster shutter and higher iso.


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Merv said…
I'd love to see 'The Windhover'
3 May 2019 at 13:30
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