A few pictures from 2020: 3. The living

(Previously: A few pictures from 2020: 2. Cinefilm. Following: A few pictures from 2020: 4. Deepest black)

In March I discovered that the jammed Minolta Auto-Rokkor 55mm lens I’d just cleaned and lubricated was lovely for portrait-distance shots. But I didn’t use it as much as I should have, because I also discovered I’d reassembled it with the wrong focus at infinity, so it was only good for portrait-distance shots. I never did fix that. Anyway, the nice duck above was one of those shots.

In May I discovered that, if you walked along the sketchy bit of land between the Westbourne Bridge and Royal Oak tube stations just beyond Paddington and peered down over the wall toward the tracks at the right time of day, you would find a family of foxes playing. I came back with a long lens (cheap Soviet Jupiter-11) and took these, a sequence of photos I really love. This was such a joy during a pretty bleak time.

I took the Jupiter lens again to the park in September to try to get a photo of magpies in flight. I do like magpies: they’re beautiful and they move in a very interesting way. They’re quick and sudden, they hop a lot, and they never exactly take off — they just hop and hop and, at the moment they want to take flight, suddenly the last hop turns out to have been liftoff.

There’s a superstition that it’s bad luck to see a lone magpie, but I decided a few years ago that I would always look at a magpie, and appreciate it.

But they’re really hard to photograph in motion, because they move in such unexpected ways. Here’s as good as I managed, a group giving way to an approaching dog:

A crow is simpler in motion. Here’s a crow taking off from the ground. Um, or I think it might actually be a raven. I am not very good at this. It’s much bigger than a magpie and takes a relatively long time to get airborne – but isn’t it fantastic!