Eyrie

Readers of this blog might be forgiven for assuming that all my work comes from the past. Heavens to Mergatroyd! No, not at all. And to prove it, I’m going to dedicate the next couple of posts, at least, to recent work.

I certainly don’t share every snapshot I make; not even on my Instagram account. Even so, sometimes a snapshot is worth a thousand words … well, a hundred or so, anyway.

So I won’t belabour the point here; I’ll let the gallery below speak for itself.

What isn’t inherently obvious from the photographs is that they represent a day this week when I roused myself from the doldrums and forced myself out to a beautiful place — Swan Lake, in Saanich, near Victoria, British Columbia — on a beautiful day between stormy winter weather.

The outing reminded me (why do I need reminding?) that the greatest joy of photography is it’s potential to literally focus one in the here-and-now. It is, at its best, a Zen practice.

Usually, I haul my DSLR cameras and telephoto lenses to this location — all the better to “enlarge” tiny songbirds. This time I grabbed my shoulder bag containing the Fujifilm X-Pro2 with Fujinon 23mm f1.4, XF 10-24mm f/4 OIS, and XF 50-140mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR lenses.

In the pockets: neutral density filters, polarizer, adapter rings, and a spare battery or two (those stabilized lenses suck power). I left my tripod at home, relying on that feature to keep things sharp.

Of course, I soon regretted the missing millimetres, especially when two beautiful bald eagles lighted in a nearby Douglas fir. Still, the 50-140* did a reasonable job framing an “environmental” study of the handsome couple, while the X-Pro 2’s 24.3MP X-Trans CMOS III APS-C sensor enables a fair amount of latitude for cropping.

Still, I want that XF100-400mmF4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR!  In reality, I’ll probably settle for XF2X TC WR, or XF1.4X TC WR teleconverters.

Anyway, enough of the techno-dweebery; here’s the photos:

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*140mm on an APS-C sensor is equivalent to 200mm on a full frame camera.