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- Chris
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I've recently had the lenses in my aged cataract-fogged eyes replaced by shiny new plastic lenses courtesy of the NHS. They also took the opportunity to correct nearly all of my considerably short sight. So I can actually now see the number on an approaching bus without needing to wear any specs at all. That's better vision than I've had for the last seventy years! And with my new distance specs on I can see the world so startlingly clearly that I'm still going out for walks and just strolling around rather slowly looking amazed at everything, astonished by the crisp detail of it all.
But there's still sufficient other age-related eye degradation of other kinds that I will never be able to see things again with quite the clarity that my youthful eyes once possessed. As indeed I'm no longer able to hear the conversations of bats in the evening. Or what anyone at all is saying in a very noisy crowded pub. So it's not surprising that when I come home after a walk with the camera that I find interesting unexpected things in my photographs that I never saw at the time. That's one of the reasons I nearly always carry a camera with me when I go out.
A week ago I took a visiting friend for a stroll around Cramond Island in the Firth of Forth, a tidal island that you can walk to when the tide is low. The sky was heavily overcast and the light was pretty dim so I didn't expect much of photographic interest, but as usual took my camera along. After walking the mile long causeway to the island I climbed up into the ruins of the WW2 gun and searchlight emplacement to get a view back.
Alongside the straight causeway built out over the Drum Sands are the "dragon's teeth", a line of slowly rotting reinforced concrete supports which used to hold reinforced concrete planks between them, in order to stop enemy submarines making their way up towards the naval ship building yards at Rosyth. That's where Britain's second aircraft carrier, the Prince of Wales, is now being finished. It's so big under the water that it will only be able to leave the Rosyth dockyard on an unusually high tide. And it's so big over the water that it will only be able to get under the Forth Rail Bridge out to sea at an unusually low tide. That's a photographic opportunity I'm looking forward to!
Over the to left, way out in the middle of the shallow waters of the low tide, I could see what might be a small figure. Through the camera's long zoom I could see that it was indeed a person paddling through the water carrying something. Just in case a later examination in the computer would show me what he was up to I took a photograph at 200mm.
Back home in front of the computer I was able to see that he was carrying his shoes. So far so uninteresting. But there was something written on the back of his T-shirt. You'll be able to read it in this crop.
Wow! It's very hard to shake off the conviction that that was a message to me from the gods! After all, who else could have seen that? Only someone with binoculars or a camera with a long zoom. And without my new plastic eyes I probably wouldn't have been able to see that there was anyone there at all to point the camera's long lens at.
But there's still sufficient other age-related eye degradation of other kinds that I will never be able to see things again with quite the clarity that my youthful eyes once possessed. As indeed I'm no longer able to hear the conversations of bats in the evening. Or what anyone at all is saying in a very noisy crowded pub. So it's not surprising that when I come home after a walk with the camera that I find interesting unexpected things in my photographs that I never saw at the time. That's one of the reasons I nearly always carry a camera with me when I go out.
A week ago I took a visiting friend for a stroll around Cramond Island in the Firth of Forth, a tidal island that you can walk to when the tide is low. The sky was heavily overcast and the light was pretty dim so I didn't expect much of photographic interest, but as usual took my camera along. After walking the mile long causeway to the island I climbed up into the ruins of the WW2 gun and searchlight emplacement to get a view back.
Alongside the straight causeway built out over the Drum Sands are the "dragon's teeth", a line of slowly rotting reinforced concrete supports which used to hold reinforced concrete planks between them, in order to stop enemy submarines making their way up towards the naval ship building yards at Rosyth. That's where Britain's second aircraft carrier, the Prince of Wales, is now being finished. It's so big under the water that it will only be able to leave the Rosyth dockyard on an unusually high tide. And it's so big over the water that it will only be able to get under the Forth Rail Bridge out to sea at an unusually low tide. That's a photographic opportunity I'm looking forward to!
Over the to left, way out in the middle of the shallow waters of the low tide, I could see what might be a small figure. Through the camera's long zoom I could see that it was indeed a person paddling through the water carrying something. Just in case a later examination in the computer would show me what he was up to I took a photograph at 200mm.
Back home in front of the computer I was able to see that he was carrying his shoes. So far so uninteresting. But there was something written on the back of his T-shirt. You'll be able to read it in this crop.
Wow! It's very hard to shake off the conviction that that was a message to me from the gods! After all, who else could have seen that? Only someone with binoculars or a camera with a long zoom. And without my new plastic eyes I probably wouldn't have been able to see that there was anyone there at all to point the camera's long lens at.