Here’s a closup of a lichen, which I believe to be Parmelia sulcata. Because it is a foliose lichen (one that is somewhat leafy), you cannot get it all in focus when you take a close photograph, so this picture is the result of 25 photographs, each focussed on a different part of the lichen. Software then picks out the sharp parts of each photograph, then joins them together to make one image.
Collected last Summer in Clocaenog Forest, North Wales.
People keep telling me how patient I must be when they see my photos of badgers, foxes, etc., but when I order a new piece of kit, I have no patience at all. I want to get my hands on it immediately, to start exploring its capabilities and limitations, and have difficulty thinking about anything else, so when the delivery of the new thermal camera was delayed for a couple of days by the state of the roads during the present cold spell, I was extremely frustrated. But whether patient or frustrated, time goes by at its own pace, and eventually, the thermal camera arrived.
My movement has been limited recently by an injury picked up playing squash, but I went on a few short walks to check out what it could do, both in the dark and in daylight, and was impressed by its ability to pick up birds going to roost at dusk, and even a wren and a blackbird hunting on the ground in the dark.
Last night, the legs seemed to be good enough, so I decided that I needed to find out how good the thermal camera was at what I had bought it for. At about 8.30 pm, I put the thermal on a monopod, got wrapped up warm, and set off for the nearest badger sett.
It was very cold, and the ice crunched under my feet as I negotiated the path beside the road out of the village. Out of the glare of the road lighting, the thermal enabled me to see the birds roosting in the trees. After a while, I came to the lane leading to the badger sett and the neighbouring farm came into view.
The warmth inside the barns was very visible, and I wondered about the cost of allowing this heat to escape.
The sett was located in a narrow wood which followed a small stream, and I entered the field bordering the wood through a gap in the hedge. Scanning around the field with the thermal, I could see several birds roosting in the trees, but what caught my attention immediately were two heat sources in the field, just outside the wood where the badger sett was.
I watched them for a while, but could see no sign of movement, so I started walking across the field towards them, stopping to check them now and then. After a while, it was obvious that the glows were not live animals, but I still had no clue what caused them.
Suddenly, realisation dawned! The badger sett entrances are dug in the near bank of the stream, and I remembered that part of the tunnels under the field had collapsed, providing openings to the complex of tunnels, which badgers did not use as they were out in the open field.
So, a couple of metres away from one of the openings, I could see the warmth of animals, badgers but maybe fox, lying up in a nest chamber underground, escaping into the freezing air.
I realised that I now had a powerful new tool for surveying badger setts and fox earths for occupancy – an excuse for lots more wandering in the dark woods! More immediately, my legs were becoming more painful, but I had to ckeck the owl nestbox attached to one of the large trees in the wood – no heat glow there.
Taking one last scan around the edges of the field revealed some roosting birds.
I made my way across the field towards the roosting birds which were more evident through the thermal than in the above picture – they are there! Look closely and you will see them.
The birds (probably pigeons) sat tight as I approached to within 20 m. of the woodland edge, but couldn’t be identified because of the intervening branches and twigs, as you can see.
I hobbled off across the field towards home. Going along the lane, I watched a bird (just a glow) hunting for food along the hedge. I could tell, from the way it moved, that it was a blackbird, and wondered why it was still hunting for food over five hours after sunset. It probably reflects the difficulty of finding enough food to survive the winter in the weather conditions we have experienced over the last few weeks.
Arriving at home, I was greeted by Rhiannon’s cat.
No, I do not need long johns – got them already. What I am talking about are those monoculars/binoculars/telescopes which shows the world in terms of the amount of infrared light everything emits, so that living things glow in the dark. I have lusted after such magic technology ever since I heard about its existence decades ago, because, through a new-found obsession with badgers, I had discovered the wonderful world of night-time wildlife.
I saw immediately how it would help navigate the darkness of a winter’s night and improve my perception of living things around me. Like stalking a badger ruffling through the autumn leaves for worms, which suddenly turned into a cow. Like stopping in the middle of a pitch black field on a moonless night, feeling that something was strange, when the feeling was resolved by a loud harrumph from the horse standing in front of me within touching distance. More importantly, I would be able to tell what was going on when watching badgers in the darkness of winter, but, of course, the cost of the technology was far more than I could afford
Instead, one of the most affordable ways of keeping track of wildlife at night was to use the fact that their eyes have a reflective layer at the back of the eyeball, so that when you shine a torch held near your head on them, the eyes reflect the light back.
I found that if you wore a head torch which cast a narrow beam, and if you lined up the beam with your binoculars, you could detect foxes, badgers, a/nd owls by their eyeshine from a couple of fields away. Badgers emerge from their setts at a time which can vary greatly in winter because the hours of darkness in which they can hunt are so long, so badger-watching at their sett is quite unrewarding. So I used to drive around in my car and scan the fields with my head torch and binoculars, looking for eyeshine.
I remember one magical night in January (years ago!), watching a pair of foxes on the other side of the field, obviously courting. All I could see were the two pairs of eyes, appearing and disappearing, dancing in the dark.
Youtube is a wonderful resource for keeping up with the developments in technology, and recently I watched some videos by Simon Eardsley and Mike Lane which showed the capabilities of the most recent thermal cameras and quick research showed that prices had dropped to a point where my pocket could afford one.
Watch this space!
Taiaroa Head, near Dunedin, New Zealand.
A pair of red-billed gulls (tarapunga), native to New Zealand.
Over the years, my cameras seem to have got bigger, and so have the lenses. I have resisted this tendency recently, first by changing to mirrorless from DSLR cameras, but also by investing in Canon’s cheaper lenses which have the advantage of being much lighter than the “professional” range. This makes it possible for the Old Git to handhold a long 800 mm lens and still get sharp results.
However, it occurred to me recently that my concentration on wildlife has restricted my photography. A long time ago, I used to carry a camera for most of the time, so I was always ready when a photo-opportunity arose.
Now, the size and weight of my equipment make this problematic, and I rarely carry my camera unless I expect wildlife opportunities. Also, I have now bought a folding bicycle, a Brompton, and go for a ride most days, and intend to cycle further afield, taking the bike by car or train. So what I needed was a “point and shoot” type camera, and after considerable research, settled on the Sony RX100 vii.
This is a tiny camera which retracts the lens when switched off, so it fits in my pocket comfortably. However, despite its diminutive size, it is a very capable camera, with the lens having a wide range from 24mm to 200m, and a lot of capability in both video and stills. I have always been in control of my photography, so calculation has always been involved before pressing the button, so it has been a new experience for me to frame a photo and then shoot with no further thought. I have been pleasantly surprised by the images it is capable of, using its lightning fast auto-focus and accurate judgement of exposure, but also its ability to change its choice of settings in different contexts, eg landscape or porttrait or macro.
However, it’s possible to operate the camera in full manual mode, so I can take control of the settings and capture an image where the automatic settings would fail. For example, I have found that it is possible to use the built-in flash to trigger a complicated lighting setup.
The camera is also very good for taking what I believe are called “selfies”, a type of photograph which was considered to betray a certain character weakness in my day. It was OK for you to be photographed by someone else, but not by yourself. Times change and old dogs can learn new tricks!
I’ve always enjoyed a proper Christmas cake. I prefer a rich fruit cake to sponge or any other filling, and I particularly love marzipan and icing. I am so glad that many friends and relations do not share my preference in this case, so in the past, the cake has usually lasted all through January.
This year, in the sad absence of my Christmas cake makers, I have decided to make it myself. However, I always cut all possible corners in cooking, and I remember that the most time-consuming process was the stirring and mixing of the ingredients of the cake itself. Now recently, I’ve been buying “Irish Whisky Cakes” from Aldi, and it occurred to me that here was a corner that could be cut!
Now there are two households that I hope to spend time with over Christmas, so I bought two Irish Whisky Cakes, marzipan, icing, apricot jam to stick the icing to the marzipan, and a little vodka in a very old bottle to stick the marzipan to the cake.
First, I opened the cake and removed the wrapping paper.
Then I kneaded the marzipan so that it became pliable enough then rolled it flat and thin. I had to use an empty wine bottle for this because, to my surprise, I couldn’t find a rolling pin in Fran’s cake-making cupboard.
Next, I used a brush from Fran’s collection of cooking tools to coat the top and sides of the cake with vodka.
I could have done with a bit more marzipan because when I applied it to each case and pressed it down all around, I found I couldn’t cover all of each cake because if I squeezed it down too thinly, It started to crack. So, on to the next stage. I had put the apricot jam jar in a pan of hot water at the start and had been stirring it every now and then.
I had previously kneaded and rolled out icing, so after I had liberally coated the marzipan with warm apricot jam, I spread the icing over the cake.
I met with the same problem – not enough icing to completely cover both cakes. Hey ho, I spread it as well as I could, added a dwarf to one cake and coloured bits to the other and called it done.
I can’t see how this cannot be pronounced a success – marzipan is marzipan, icing is icing, and I’ve already thoroughly tested the Irish Whisky Cake. Next year, I’ll buy more marzipan and icing. I’ve no problem with that.
Merry Christmas!
Recently, I have been scanning negatives of photographs which I took over fifty years ago. It is one of the delights of photography as a hobby that a diligent archive provides you with a record of your life which can both stimulate your memory and provide raw material for artwork. It has been an extremely emotional task.
I foiund that at one point in the 1970s, I took a few photographs of wood block style graphics from a book, presumably used to illustrate the beginning of each chapter in the book. I never printed them at the time, but now I found them very attractive, so I cleaned up the images, and here they are:
I find these images beautiful, and the mastery of the technique for producing them amazing. It involves flattening the wood surface to be used to generate the image, and then carving wood away from the light areas in the image. A roller carrying the ink is rolled across the surface, so that the flat uncarved areas transfer the ink to the paper.
I frequently find it difficult to interpret a black and white negative (impossible with a colour negative), but the carver of a wood block must produce the image as a negative! Amazing!
Near the wood block negatives in the photo album was a photo of this image:
Now this is a line engraving. This is produced on a highly polished steel plate, which is scratched (simplification!) to produce the image. At least the artist is producing a positive rather than a negative, but I remain in awe of the skill required to produce images in this way.
To produce a print, an inked roller runs over the surface, the surface is wiped clean, leaving ink in all of the scratches. The paper is placed in position on the plate and a roller presses it down so that the paper picks up the ink from the scratches.
I wanted to see the originals of these images, taken over fifty years ago, remember, and searched my bookcases and boxes in the attic, but without success. However, I did find this book, “The World at Home” by Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, published in 1871, which has obviously spent time in a secondhand book shop. I don’t think that I bought it, so it probably came to me from my parents.
This book would have been the equivalent of a 21st century encyclopaedia full of photographs because it is profusely illustrated, but only with line engravings. I presume that it was published before it became technically possible to produce photographic illustrations. One of the most impressive pictures is of the Icelandic volcano, Mount Hecla:
I googled “Mount Hecla” for pictures, and found some other line engravings of the volcano, as well as other views in Icelend. What is interesting is that there are several engravings from this point of view which are distinctly different. One does not have the figures in the foreground, another has the smoke from the volcano blowing from right to left.
It seems that there was a tourist scene in Iceland in the 1880s, at least among artists. Hardy people, those Victorians!
It’s seven years since my last post on my previous blog, and now I’m ready to start blogging again. My circumstances have changed dramatically since then (see About), so the focus of this blog is quite different – as of now in 2024, I am 82 years of age, and I have the experience of 23 years of retirement behind me. I can claim to be rather more expert at this phase of life than I was in 2001, but I feel I am entering a time of life which is different, in which friends and relatives see me differently, partly due to changes in their own life, partly to changes in mine.
I am fortunate that my body is holding up better than most at my age. I have a maimed finger because of a poor decision involving a chisel and a tin of paint, a rupture due to a moment of poor technique while lifting, and my senses are failing. However, my joints remain sound and I get around well enough.
But I look at my hands, and I see the wrinkled skin, parchment thin, which seems to have shrunk around the bones and tendons. Some of the finger joints are swollen with arthritis, and there are usually blotches where tiny blood vessels have burst. When I use them to grip, hard, the fingers often freeze and have to be forced back into shape. There’s no getting away from it, they are the hands of an old man, which seems strange to the twenty-something living in my head.
I shall try to use this blog to comment on life at my time of life, a perspective which is not often shared. I will also talk about episodes in my past life that I like to think about, and share an old man’s present day foolishnesses. Photographs are likely to feature frequently.
As a possible example of such foolishness, I have recently bought a Brompton folding bicycle, an electric one. This is a bike that is beautifully engineered, built by a company which takes a pride in their product, which has an outstanding reputation for quality and reliability. My struggles over a few weeks to purchase a working defect-free bike from them has left a succession of Brompton employees embarassed and shame-faced. I am on my third new bike, all of which suffered a variety of faults, and my second battery. There was a point where I wondered whether life was trying to tell me something, rather than just inflicting a period of incredibly bad luck on me.
But I now have a Brompton bike which is perfect, good-looking, and ready to take me on new adventures, sometimes by train and car. No, don’t tell me I’m too old for that.