On my walk

For years I took my little Leica X1 on my early morning walk. But then I wanted to walk faster and I decided that I had exhausted the photo ops on my walk so I left the camera at home most of the time.

Recently I have been using my new series iPhone SE to take photos on the early morning walk. The image quality is really impressive but still I am not happy using the phone as a camera. It is a matter of haptics-touch and feel and handling generally. It just does not feel right. I find composing and framing the photo on the camera's screen difficult. Maybe it is a matter of what I am used to over many years. Maybe I am just stuck in a groove but I'll take a proper viewfinder any day over a LCD screen.

Having said that here's a photo I took with the iPhone earlier this week. The bird in the tree is a kookaburra-the Australian laughing bird. It's unusual to see a kookaburra in scrub on the cliff top walk. Usually they are in the gumtrees just a few hundred metres in land.There are dozens in the trees around my house and the kookaburras start their demented laughing in unison at around 4.30am at this time of the year. The reason they get away with it is that they look such a jolly, friendly bird. They are the quintessential Australian icon-along with the kangaroo, the koala and the emu.

They have quite extraordinary eyesight. I have watched a young kookaburra sit on the power lines outside my house and spot a tiny skink in the garden 10 metres away and swoop straight down on it and then devour it.