Sunday 6 March 2016

Portmarnock

My new glasses were ready for collection  - and the options were to drive over on Saturday, or for me to get the train out on Wednesday and then go all the way the other direction to Greystones. It would have worked - but it was a fine sunny day, so C suggested that we could collect them and then go for a walk along Portmarnock strand. 
Until I was about 3 my parents lived nearby, and my mother often used to push the pram along the seafront, but my first personal memory of it was a school trip when I was in 1st or 2nd year - and I loved it! So different to our Greystones beaches - much sandier, and many, many more shells.

In the second photo, looking back towards the town, you can see an old Martello tower (fortifications built along the coast by the British).

This is a photo-heavy post, but it didn't seem worth splitting them into two.






The beach is under one of the flight paths to Dublin airport, so every five minutes or less a new plane kept passing overhead.





Lambay Island




Portmarnock Hotel





As we returned to the car-park, there were two people walking right along the edge of the water and stooping down regularly to pick something up and drop it into a bag. I'm guessing it was must have been some sort of shellfish.

The jury is out on my new glasses; there was the option of getting a free upgrade to reactive lenses, with the option of downgrading at no charge within one month. I don't normally bother with sunglasses and have to admit that it was very nice not to be squinting, but I am not sure, as someone who lives with a camera in her bag, whether I can cope with the colour distortions. It was also rather disconcerting that when reviewing a photo to see if the exposure was correct, I had to look over the glasses; not doing that was one of my main reasons for switching to varifocals last time I got new ones! I'll give myself two weeks to decide...

1 comment:

Lorraine said...

What a lovely walk. Sailboats, gulls, shells, and sun - and your camera caught it all. I love the picture with the two dogs showing all those levels of texture, right up to the sky with movement in opposite directions. Great capture. I remember looking for the holes with the bubbles in the sand as the water receded and sticking my hand into the sand and pulling up clams. I don't know that they were the kind for eating, but that's what we used to do as kids. And I know what you mean about the glasses/sunglasses. I am dependent on my sunglasses outside year-round because my eyes are so sensitive to the light, but when I have the camera along, I'm constantly juggling to get them off and sometimes (actually a lot of times) the colors through the sunglasses are so much more intense that I wish I could use them as a filter. If I use the view screen on the camera, then I need to put on my glasses, which is why I have tried to stick to cameras that have an eyeviewer - so I don't have to fumble around for those glasses, and actually to keep my shots steadier. Good luck with your adjustment to your new specs.