by Chris Bertram on March 24, 2024
A wonderful few days in Paris where, among other things, we visited the Musée Albert Kahn in Boulogne-Billancourt, which was closed for a long time for “travaux”, but is now refurbished. I’ve wanted to visit the MAK for years to see the collection of autochromes that are the fruit of the expeditions that Kahn financed before WW1 in the belief that if the peoples of the world understood one another better, they would not go to war. Well. Kahn was also a big promoter of the League of Nations. The autochromes are wonderful but all viewable online, but I was not prepared for the Japanese-inspired gardens that Kahn created. Really worth the visit on their own. (All easy to get to, on the metro btw).
Here’s a link to the autochromes.
by Chris Bertram on March 17, 2024
Another Sunday rolls around, and I haven’t written anything substantial here in ages. But here’s a starling:
by Chris Bertram on March 10, 2024
by Chris Bertram on March 3, 2024
by Chris Bertram on February 25, 2024
by Chris Bertram on February 18, 2024
The weather hasn’t been great, but the other day the sun came out for a bit so I could get the long lens out. These characters came out to feed. Long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus):
by Chris Bertram on February 11, 2024
by Chris Bertram on February 4, 2024
by Chris Bertram on January 28, 2024
by Chris Bertram on January 21, 2024
I’ve been reading Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants (oddly available in two different English translations as Heart (US) and Mending the Living (UK)), which I highly recommend. De Kerangal’s speciality is writing about people at work and this is the saga of a heart transplant over 24h, from the beginning of the donor’s day (a trip to go surfing) to the moment his heart re-starts in the recipient’s body. She gives compelling portraits of the people who work in intensive care medicine, and one of them is a nurse with a specialism in overseen the transplant and liaising with the family, who also happens to be a singer with an interest in song, including birdsong. So, there’s a passage in the book where there’s discussion of the Algerian trade in goldfinches (chardonnet in French), which, apparently, get sold for vast sums for their singing prowess. There must be something special about the Algerian ones, because the goldfinch is not an endangered species: there are lots of them out there. So, I’ve been reading about goldfinches and listening to clips of their song, and I’ve just bought a new camera lens with a reach of 800mm (full-frame equivalent) and I see birds in the distance from my living room window. I can’t really see what they are, so I pick up the lens and I see a treeful of goldfinches. And I press, through window glass. Not the greatest image, but serendipitous.
by Chris Bertram on January 14, 2024
I’ve been taking photography seriously for 17 years now. And every year I assemble a 6 x 6 “poster” of my best photos from each year. So that makes 612 photos on those poster. Here’s one of the very first, from January 2007, and taken with a 1 megapixel Fuji point-and-shoot.
by Chris Bertram on January 7, 2024
by Chris Bertram on December 31, 2023
I only had an oldish iPhone on me, unfortunately
by Chris Bertram on December 24, 2023
by Chris Bertram on December 22, 2023
I don’t know about you, but my relationship to dentistry is somewhat infantile. I went this week. I go every six months (hygienist too) but though I brush twice a day with an expensive electric toothbrush, I’m very bad at all that interdental work you’re supposed to do. But then when I notice that the appointment is coming up, for ten days or so, fearful of being told off by the dentist, I work hard with those little brushes – red, blue and yellow – in the hope that I won’t be admonished this time round.
It never really works. There’s always some plaque here, some bleeding there and I get the lecture on what I have to do. Often it seems to be the opposite of what I remember from the previous time: use the thinnest brush first or last? And there was a period when the hygienist was keen on interdental brushes and the dentist was pushing me to floss instead. But they seem to have converged on the little brushes now.
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