Ireland day 0828. Thursday 04 January 2024- Routine *

Ireland day 0828. Thursday 04 January 2024- Routine

Today’s summary	Val was away in London and I spent some more time planning possible holidays then went to the office mid morning. A productive day after which I came back and in the evening went on another dark walk, chatted to Val, and had a light dinner.
Today’s weather	Dry, bright and cool. Light westerly wind. Appx 7c

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Another dark walk

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

Thank goodness for Night Mode!

In case there are any readers who aren’t familiar with this technology, basically it’s a new feature of the iPhone camera which allows you to take pictures in near complete darkness. It “cheats” to do this by taking several – maybe even hundreds – of individual short exposure photos over a couple of seconds, after you press the shutter button. Then it uses software to identify common points on all the photos and then stacks all the images on top of each other to create a composite photo which is both in focus and possibly hundreds of times brighter than any individual image would be (I guess that modern Android smartphones have it too). Anyway, whatever it is, without it there would have been essentially no photos from the last few weeks since I started work, as almost all my photograph-able sorties outdoors have been in the dark, when a “normal” camera simply wouldn’t have been able to record anything visible.

So with Val still being away in London, I was left to my own devices and my day fell into a familiar routine. A bit of fiddling around first thing speculating about possible holidays, then off to the office mid morning – for what turned out to be quite a productive day. Then home about 6, just time for one of my by-now-familiar night time walks, a quick video call to Val, and a light snack-y type dinner.

All that’s successfully completed so I’m going to watch a bit of TV now, and contemplate a repeat performance of more of the same tomorrow.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Along the coast path, heading for Malahide	Right in the middle of the photo, a lonely heron was disconsolately plodding about on the shoreline. Hoping to make an easy catch of an unfortunate sea creature lured inshore by the artificial lights of the town, perhaps





If you look carefully in the gap between the clouds and the tree, you should just be able to pick out the constellation of Orion. This is a 3-second hand-held exposure. That’s what image stacking does for you.