sky first then shoes: birds

2014-02-08

swan-rād

Old English poetry was full of a metaphorical technique called kenning, in which regular words were replaced by compounds which gave a poetic flavour to the description. Thus 'sun' can become 'sky-candle', and 'warrior' can become 'feeder of war gulls' - a double modified expression, in which war-gulls refer to ravens, the carrion birds attracted by the dead after a battle (nice, eh?). And what of the sea? In the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, mighty ships plough the sail-road, the whale-road and the swan-road.

The when light hits the surface of the water, it creates a dispersed pattern of reflection stretching from the horizon towards the viewer. As light scatters off the moving surfaces of the ripples, only those beams which reflect towards the observer are visible. The resulting twinkly surface is called a glitter-path, and when the individual twinkles are summed together (as in this long exposure), the result is a clear, bright bridge. Here, the moon-bridge stretches right across the bay to the old town of Swanage (Anglo-Saxon name: Swanwich, meaning... wait for it... swan-village). Anyone fancy a stroll along the moon bridge across the swan-road to Swan-town?

Captured at Boscombe, Dorset

2014-01-16

cities in the sky

Overlooking Penang and Butterworth, Malaysia. Still impressed by the size of towering cloud-mountains, relative to our puny, human-sized achievements...