Daily Photo - April 16-30
For 2020, I am photographing every day, and posting the best of each day in half-month increments.
2020 April 16, Thursday
I started the back half of April flying high, like this eagle winging its way across the harbour. Much as we like to say that eagles are the iconic animal of Williams Point, they are here not for the Point itself, but rather the estuary.
Olympus E-PL1: f8, 1/400 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 17, Friday
Do you know what does great in water? Beavers!
Do you know what does awfully in water? Cameras. Just after taking this picture I foolishly misjudged my footing and tumbled into the one spot along the coast where the water is quite deep. I dried out quickly, but my phone, camera, and lens drowned. It was a huge downer for me.
Olympus E-PL1: f6.3, 1/250 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 18, Saturday
I did not know it at the time, but April 18, 2020 would turn out darker than my moping over some lost tech. A few hours after I captured some of the damage to my lens with my computer's webcam, a few dozen kilometers away, a deranged man started a shooting rampage. It is the worst in Nova Scotia's history. The gunman killed twenty-two people, including a pregnant woman, before in turn being shot to death by the RCMP. Already in a fragile state from the Covid-19 lockdown, the event took a major toll on the province's psyche.
Laptop Webcam: Settings Unknown
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 19, Sunday
The mass shooting was a multi-hour event, lasting into Sunday. At first we didn't know how extensive it was; early reports put the tragedy at half the eventual death toll.
For the purposes of my photo-a-day effort, I was stuck without a way to take pictures. I scanned in a painting I'd done over Christmas, based on a line from the 1918 post-apocalyptic poem There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale:
"Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire"
Scanned Painting: Acrylic On Canvas-Board
2020 April 20, Monday
I didn't even scan in another painting on April twentieth. The news of the shooting was coming out in greater detail, and I was emotionally convulsing. I was mourning for the senseless loss and feeling guilty in the knowledge that the pandemic was doing far, far much more damage that we didn't have the energy to face. I admit, I was also still sad about losing my camera, trivial as I knew it was in the face of everything else.
2020 April 21, Tuesday
My parents dropped off some things from their house, including my Air Module. It is meant to be a photographic companion for smartphones. It is essentially a sensor that fits to the back of a camera, but has no viewfinder or screen; the only control is a shutter button. The idea is to run it from a phone, which provides both screen and controls. Given that my phone was also gone, the best I could do was point it like a flashlight and hope that the autofocus worked.
Olympus Air A-101: f3.5, 1/80 sec, ISO 1000
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 22, Wednesday
Trying to take pictures with no feedback from the camera is rather frustrating. I would take dozens and dozens of snaps, never knowing if they were in focus or if the lighting was right. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's almost like an analogy to feeling one's way through turmoil piled on top of a pandemic, never knowing what's coming next.
Olympus Air A-101: f3.5, 1/60 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 23, Thursday
The sunset illuminates the ring island in the estuary... Trust me, it's there behind fence and brush, and it really was a beautiful sunset. It's important to enjoy the tranquil parts of life, hard as it may be to focus on them sometimes.
Olympus Air A-101: f2.2, 1/60 sec, ISO 400
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 24, Friday
It was a wonderful gift to finally get a decent photo... I won't tell you how many blurry or half-out-of-frame feathers I had to sift through once I got back to my computer!
Olympus Air A-101: f3.5, 1/60 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 25, Saturday
I've seen stumps before, but never one quite like this. How peculiar!
Olympus Air A-101: f2.5, 1/120 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 26, Sunday
A week after the shooting, I was having fewer bouts of debilitating grief, though they still cropped up occasionally. As for photographing with the Air Module, it sometimes gave me a good result, but I was not finding it very enjoyable. It's hard to bring an element of art to something when you don't really get to interact with it until the editing phase. Rather than hunting out good pictures, it feels like trapping them as they fly by.
Olympus Air A-101: f10, 1/640 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 27, Monday
Walks along the water, collecting interesting bits of driftwood, trying to capture nice pictures (even if there's no accounting for a camera's colour settings)... All good things to ease the soul.
Olympus Air A-101: f9, 1/500 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 28, Tuesday
Just what we all wanted... Two days of snow at the end of April! By then, though I think most people had come around to not complaining about things that really weren't worth griping over. The snow came, covered everything, and then melted away a few days later.
Olympus Air A-101: f2.5, 1/2000 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 29, Wednesday
While the snow was wondering whether or not to melt in Nova Scotia, half a world away there was more bad news on the horizon. A helicopter crash claimed the life of a Canadian military member, with five others listed as missing. Hope fades fast in a cold ocean, and I'm dreading updates. This all feels close to home because the helicopter was based on the HMCS Fredericton. My father served on the Freddy, and even though that was years ago I still feel connected to the ship.
Olympus Air A-101: f2.5, 1/1000 sec, ISO 200
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
2020 April 30, Thursday
Despite what makes it onto the evening news, there are good stories all over the world. Back on April 15 I planted some seeds. I hope to (finally) grow a golden chain tree like the one that so entranced me in my host family's garden when I studied in Germany nearly two decades ago. By the end of the month, the seeds were sprouting!
Olympus E-PL9: f6.3, 1/250 sec, ISO 6400
IrfanView: Crop, Colour Balance
"But wait," I can almost hear you say, "that picture looks so deliberate!"
Indeed it is! I photographed the sprouts with a new camera and lens, which arrived ahead of schedule - a feat practically unheard-of in the wild logistics of the Covid-19 lockdown. My old camera was an Olympus E-PL1, on which I used a 14-150mm f4-5.6 lens. My replacement (which comes ten years after I bought the original camera) is an E-PL9 with a 12-200mm f3.5-6.3 lens. I am very much looking forward to exploring this new system in May and (hopefully!) over the next ten years. Even more than the hardware itself, the opportunity to just see the world again and pursue my visions is something that I can't help but smile about.