Cambridge University teams train along the River Cam and this is one of the boathouses. I thought for a minute or two that the heron was a model, a dummy, put by the water’s edge by some of the people from the boathouse. But then, herons sit/stand very still. And then it moved. It was small. Not so much small of itself, but small in the frame because I was on the other side of the river. I had a standard zoom that went out to 55mm (82.5mm full-frame equivalent), and still the heron was just a small figure in the frame. Can you see it? Really I took the shot to see what the heron would look like in the image, bearing in mind it occupies about one or two percent of the frame. When I cropped it to show the heron in closeup, would it be small and blurry and indistinct?

Getting ready, picking up their scythes and moving. Moving either away because they are not in the competition, or to the place they should stand to get ready for scything. And now they are in position and ready for the competition. Who can scythe a marked-off patch of grass in the shortest time? Years ago, when I had a biggish piece of land, I had a scythe. I probably bought it secondhand at a dead-stock market. And although it is a long time since I held a scythe, I could imagine the balance, the weight, the swing of it, and the resistance of the grass. So these images may well mean more than the casual viewer can get from them. But I do like the little dog.

Nikon D5600 with 8-55mm AF-P lens / 1/80th second at f8, ISO 800, at 23mm Here below is a screen grab of the image before processing. The biggest thing I did was to straighten up the verticals of the frame of the archway. At least, that’s what I thought until I looked at the two images on the same page, as it were. Now I can see how much I bumped up the saturation, particularly of the area beyond the archway. The final result looks almost too garish when I compare it with the untouched version. It didn’t look like that when I looked at it on its own, though. How variable is the experience of experience.