Moon Shot

(c) Roger Overall 2009

This photograph was taken a couple of days ago on the coast near Union Hall, Co. Cork, while out on a shoot with Peter Cox, a leading landscaper here in Ireland.

It was also taken with one of Peter’s lenses. Most of my work is shot with a 24mm lens, which I’d left at home in favour of a 20mm, and it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d need anything longer on a landscape shoot. You know, it’s all about vistas this landscape stuff, yes?

No.

(c) Roger Overall 2009

See what I mean?

OK, it’s not dreadful, but it lacks impact. Maybe some foreground interest would help.

(c) Roger Overall 2009

Much better.

I also shot some film on a 1950s Agfa that produces 6×9 negs. I haven’t had a chance to drop the roll into my local lab yet, so it’ll be a while before I see the results. Besides with only 8 frames per roll, you choose what you shoot very carefully. The main drawback of digital is that there is no financial cost to going trigger happy and that can make you sloppy. In fact, I’m working hard to keep my shutter finger under control these days, concentrating more on getting better results with fewer frames.

A funny thing happened while we were scouting the location earlier in the evening. We strayed across a family setting up a barbecue, with the dad fishing for mackerel out on the rocks. Peter called over to see whether he’d had any luck. Turns out it was Calvin Jones, better know to me as calvin141170 over on Twitter. I’d never met him before, but had been following his tweets and we have several Twitter friends (twends?) in common. I recognized him from his avatar and we got chatting.

Calvin has an interest in photography, and can take a picture himself, so we got talking pictures and he called over a friend who was visiting from Spain. Turns out he shoots editorial work, including for El Pais and was just back from Afghanistan. So there’s four photographers talking shop while Calvin’s daughters are trying to get daddy back fishing. They’re like hungry. I think the kids were quite relieved when Peter and I moved on.

Nonetheless, it’s a small world and I can only marvel at the opportunities to make new friends that modern social networking allows us.

I can also only marvel at the incredible applications that Peter had on his iPhone that helped him to determine where and at what time the moon would rise. He also has an astronomy app that tells you which stars and planets you are looking at. And there’s a compass. I think it allows you to make phone calls as well. I badly want one, but can’t yet justify it for the business… Mind you… It does have a built-in camera.

***UPDATE***

Calvin wrote about our chance encounter here: Calvin’s Blog. Moreover, Calvin and Peter have been twittering.

And so a new friendship is born.

Don’t you just love modern social media? I can remember when you had to go down the pub to make new friends. Now any old piece of rock on the coast will do.