Old Photos

It has been wet and windy in Southern England.  It’s probably been wet and windy elsewhere, too.  After a hectic autumn, my partner and I have spent the last few weekends at home, mooching.  During one of our mooches, I wondered aloud where some of our old photos had got to.

We had some great photos of bushwalks we did in Australia and I wanted them.

I realised, in answering a comment on my Requiem for a Ricoh R7 post, that we have only been using a digital camera since about October 2005, when my sister gave me her old Olympus because she wanted to upgrade to something more compact and that had *fewer* confusing buttons.  (And here I am looking for things that have *more* confusing buttons).

Do you remember the days when a camera was a rare thing?

Before the Olympus, I never owned a camera.  When I went on trips, I would buy a disposable camera and husband my photographs oh-so carefully.  I often husbanded so well that it would be months after a holiday that I would finally finish the film in the camera and get the photos developed.  Imagine that – fewer than 36 photos from a weekend trip.  Actually, we took one holiday – a two week camping, hiking and driving adventure from Perth in Western Australia, down to the Great Australian Bight, across the Nullarbor and into South Australia and Adelaide – from which we had fewer than 36 photos. These days we have something like 200 photos from a weekend, of which about 60 are ‘keepers’.

I was so sure we had photos from a hike up to Mt Mitchell in the Main Range National Park and I wanted to find those photos.  We had taken photos of a spunky skink, a spiky sunflower-type wildflower and the unique peak of Mt Cordeaux – another mountain just across Cunningham’s Gap from Mt Mitchell.  These are all fairly typical photography subjects for us: the local fauna, the local floral and mountains.  Lots of photos of mountains.

Then I remembered: the photos I was after were in our pre-digital days.  They were only in albums, tucked carefully away in my partner’s parents’ house.  After we had reached the summit of Mt Mitchell, there was but one photo left.  Because the bushwalk was an up-and-back track (rather than a circular one), we’d seen and photographed the interesting things on the way up already.  This meant I could use the last photo for something I wanted a photo of but would never have wasted a picture on:- the steps taking us up to the summit.  As we were on the last photo and that camera also had pictures from our trip in Cairns a few months earlier, I took a photo of the steps to use the film up.  About 5 metres on from the steps, we encountered an enormous python with gorgeous markings sprawled across the path.  Oh, the recriminations heaped upon my head for using that last photograph on some steps.

I was also absolutely certain we had some fabulous photographs of kookaburras and I wanted them.  My partner said casually, “They’re probably on one of the CDs of the backups of your computer that we did.  Where else would they be?”  And, of course (oh, this is so aggravating), he was right.

Kookaburra sits on our old Hills Hoist ...

But along with the photos of the kookaburras, I found 58 (give or take) photos of a sunset from a lookout near Witches Creek Falls, Mt Tamborine.  I started laughing when I saw these photos.  “Remember these?” My partner looked puzzled, briefly, and then recalled them.  We had walked to a lookout to watch the sun set during one of our laziest ever holidays.   The lookout was to Queensland’s ‘Scenic Rim’, an arc of mountains south west of Brisbane, where we also spent a lot of time.  While at the lookout, I’m sure there was a bit of both of us wishing we’d gone up to those mountains instead of to much tamer Tamborine (it’s nice enough but not very satisfactory for active bushwalkers like us; the trails are too short, all less than 4kms or so).  My partner has a thing for sunsets.  He can’t stop taking photos of them and he always justifies his excessive phototaking with, “But the light kept changing!”

And that was the moment of my epiphany: with a digital camera, he could just keep snapping away to his heart’s delight and then dump the photos onto my laptop and forget about them until 4 years later.  Brilliant.

The task of sorting through the sunset photos for some keepers is too much for me at the moment.  I’ll show you some (but not 58) when I can work up the energy to be sufficiently discriminating.

Oh, and Queenslanders – the walks from Cunningham’s Gap to either Mt Mitchell (left hand side of the road if you are standing with your back to Qld and facing into NSW – you do have to cross the highway from the picnic ground / car park to find the start of the walk…) or Mt Cordeaux (right hand side of the road as above etc leaving directly from the carpark) are fantastic, easy walks very accessible from Brisbane as a day trip.  I like Mt Cordeaux best, because it’s a walk through rainforest and then emerging onto an exposed summit – wonderful place for lunch.  Mt Mitchell is a great and very easy uphill stroll for about 5 kms but is very exposed and so not great during the height of summer.  Oh, and on your way back to BrisVegas, stop in Rathdowney Aratula * for a burger.  You won’t regret it.

* UPDATE / EDIT / CORRECTION: Oh, I am such a LIAR.  You will regret going to Rathdowney if you are heading back to BrisVegas from Cunningham’s Gap – it’s in the opposite direction and will set you back about 2 hours.  The place to stop for a burger is Aratula.  Still, you should go to Rathdowney sometime, and *then* onto Mt Barney.  Mt Barney is great.

House Martins

I don’t think I remembered to show you this picutre.

Papa feeding his babies: House Martins, Corniglia, Italy, June 2009

They were terribly noisy.  In a narrow laneway, this neat nest filled with ravenous baby birds caught my attention.  I stood in the doorway opposite and watched.  I was no more than a body length away.

No one else paid them any mind until they saw me craning my neck and fiddling with my camera, taking shot after shot.  Unhappy, I switched cameras trying to get it right.  Eventually, I handed the Fuji to my partner, who wanted to have a look at the scenery or something ridiculous like that, while I stayed there and watched Papa’s amazingly accurate flight from nest to foraging ground and back to nest.  Papa left and returned at least 15 times while I stood and watched.  Equally, the faces around me changed at least 10 times.  People came and stood next to me.  A few would, “Ooh!” and some would, “Aah!”; most took a snap and wandered off.  I wanted to grab onto some of those people and say, “Just stay a bit.  You should see the way he flies.  And oh, the way that front one pokes its head out when Papa’s gone and checks us out.”  But they were off to the next thing.

I had to be dragged away, stumbling along the cobblestones and looking over my shoulder .

Puffin Noises

I should have said in my last post (although I really did already say rather a lot) that puffins make the most hilarious sounds.

They are generally noiseless birds, except when breeding.  And no, that doesn’t mean I was listening in on them doing the dirty to make more cute puffins (and oh my, baby puffins are just so – *sigh*).  When they are ready to breed they start making noises, i.e. throughout the summer.  Winter must be a strange time for puffins: floating in the Atlantic Sea and saying nothing at all.

I first heard this weird mechanical sound, like the whirring of a petrol-powered lawn mower, with the volume turned down real low.  At the time, I was standing beside the Puffin Cam, so I thought it was just that.  But then I moved about 10 metres away from the Puffin Cam and heard the sound again.  It seemed to be coming from the ground.  Listening harder, I realised, Mr Puffins hums like a lawn mower that just won’t start.

You can hear it here.

The sound quality of the recording on the RSPB’s website is excellent.  It doesn’t give you an idea of how it actually sounds out there, on the edge of the cliff.  So, to get the true picture: turn the volume down real low, grin like an idiot, let your brain turn to mush and think what it’s like to get to eat your favourite food after months and months of waiting .  There, that’s what it’s like to listen to a puffin.

Puffins! (No. I am not obsessed.  Oh, okay. Yes I am.)

Puffins!

Have you noticed my new header image? If not, please go look.

Oh, who am I kidding. Here’s the picture in its full glory.

Hello!

In October 2008, I booked one night’s accommodation on an island where Atlantic puffins return each year to their cliffside burrows to breed, before returning back to the deep sea in late July.

I adore birds. When we moved to the UK, I finally understood why people say birds sing. In Australia, birds do not sing. They squawk, they screech, they cry, they chatter – but they do not sing. The most musical bird I have ever heard in Australia is the bellbird, where each call is like the tinkling of a doorbell in a quaint second hand bookshop. The most awful bird I have ever heard is the black cockatoo; its mating call sounds like someone dying painfully and slowly. The most haunting cry I have heard is that of the curlew at dusk: a mother calling desperately for a child, whom she knows can never return.

In England, the birds have songs. Lilting melodies that change in pitch and tone, rising and falling. I first heard the song of a robin, and it was the characteristic twitter twitter tweet tweet that books tell me birds sing but that I had never before experienced. The tree outside our little flat’s living room window were visited by tiny blue winged birds with yellow breasts and black markings that look like they were wearing ties. I had to identify them. Naturally, I joined the RSPB. (They are blue tits.)

Pictures of puffins adorned RSPB paraphernilia. And no wonder: they are very cute birds. My knowledge of puffins was as the brand of the children’s paperback books spinoff from Penguin Books. They are shaped a lot like penguins, and being sea birds, I just assumed they were roughly the same size – even though I know the size of penguins ranges a lot (from the tiny Fairy Penguins all the way up the huge Emperor Penguins). My RSPB magazines kept telling me that puffins were small, so I readjusted my expectations until I read a description that they were about the size of a large potato. I just had to see one, in real life.

Every time I read the RSPB’s description of puffins, I misread it and it makes me giggle like a 5 year old: “An unmistakable bird with its black back and white underpants…”
A bird with underpants? Oh, I have to see one. First, a bird wearing tie. Now, a bird wearing underpants. The northern hemisphere is just too, too funny. I have to see one.

Mostly, it seemed that puffins had their breeding colonies somewhere north. We are somewhere oh-so-very south. Then, I found Skomer Island, serendipitously, while researching accommodation on islands and in lighthouses. I tried to book a visit in 2008 but discovered they were all booked out and that I would have to book for 2009. On the very first day that booking opened to the general public, I phoned. I spent 3 hours that morning phoning until I got through. When I did get through, we only had two choices: one early in the season and one late. I chose late. I have never, ever been so committed to booking anything. Even tickets to a Tom Waits concert only took me one hour of hitting the ‘refresh’ button on TicketMaster’s website.

Since October 2008, I have been eagerly anticipating our visit and whenever I remembered we would be going, I would grin and clap my hands like a pleased child. Oh, puffins!

Shortly before we left, I read on the Skomer Island Blog that the puffins would be leaving soon. I tried not to let it happen, but stirrings of anxiety started to undercut each pleased clap of my hands. Please, please let them still be on the island, I chanted quietly to myself. I went googling photographs on the web of ‘Skomer puffins’ to see how late photographers had managed to capture images of these (I hoped) adorable birds to try to reassure myself that they would still be there when we arrived, mid-July.

We planned a cycling trip around the puffin visit and I told myself that even if I did not see puffins, the cycling, the countryside would be worth it. And they were, the cycling was challenging and great fun; the landscape was beautiful and I would probably be quite happy to be on the island even without puffins; after all, there would be other seabirds. (But I really did want to see puffins…)

The morning before we caught the ferry across from the mainland to Skomer Island, I started to worry about whether we would be able to get on the ferry. Everyone had told us how people queued for the ferry early. I also worried about whether the weather – it had been variable – would let us cross and if it let us cross, whether it would let us come back again. I was pretty gleeful with the idea that we would be stuck on the island. That would have been brilliant.

As the ferry crossed the choppy waters, little birds darted nearby. I gasped and grabbed at my partner. “Is it a puffin?” I whispered into his ears. (I did not want to say it any louder in case the other people on the ferry, many clearly birders and experienced, heavily equipped photographers scoffed at my ignorance.) “Not sure,” he whispered back. And then one flew close enough and I saw unmistakable flashes of orange, whether it was beak or feet did not matter at that stage, “Puffins!” I exclaimed, clapping my hands. The rain had started in earnest now and was coming in sideways, but I could not care. As we neared the island, more and more puffins flew past, and many of them floated in the ocean beside the high cliffs.

Nothing could disappoint then, and nothing did. All the anticipation and even most of the anxiety was worth those first glimpses of puffins, and then the much later up-close viewings of them.

Puffin hiding in the grass.

Puffin thinks: "Is it time to fly out for more sand eels, again?" (I'm a notorious, incorrigible anthropomorphiser.)

Oi, You! No more photographs! (A Naomi Campbell puffin? I almost fell in the mud in my haste to get out of the way; note that I didn't forget to press the shutter button down before doing so.)

How exactly does Oanh not anthropomorphise this?

Along with day visitors to the island – not many that day due to the poor weather – were a number of men laden down with all manner of expensive photographic equipment and enormous, unwieldy lenses.

To give you a sense of scale: men with big photographic equipment pointed at itsy bitsy puffins. (Puffins!)

I bear a lot of affection for this photo, though I am well aware of its faults (exposure, composition, focus you name it).  Notice the second guy from the front, with his camera down.  As I edged closer to look at the puffins, he murmurred at me, “Aren’t they magical?” and I had to resist the temptation to hug him.  I loved that he was so awed and so taken with the puffins, rather than trying to capture The Shot.   I didn’t even compete.  I wanted a few decent photographs, but then I put my camera away and just marvelled at these magnificent, charismatic, characterful creatures.  All the hype puffins gets?  They can take it.

Puffins!