Category: Photography

You can’t miss the tallest peak in Athens, no not the one with The Parthenon at the top (68 metres elevation), but Mount Lycabettus, also known as Lycabettos, Lykabettos or Lykavittos. In Greek, it’s pronounced “likavi’tos”, so the first three syllables flow as a triplet and the emphasis is on the final beat. It stands at 264 metres.

Second full day on our trip to Athens, we took the funicular railway to the top to see the 19th Century St George’s Chapel and take in the views over the city. I’d have chosen to climb to the top, despite the heat, if I’d realised it was in a tunnel. But, we did walk down and then circumnavigate the pine woodland the begins about half way down and stretches to the base.

One of the things I found intriguing about the name of this hill is the “lika/lyco” prefix, that I thought must refer to wolves in some way, but a couple of Athenians I asked didn’t seem to think so. On Wikipedia, there’s a suggestion that it had an ancient name Lucabetu meaning a mastoid hill, but Wiki also says that the modern name means “walked by wolves”.

Could the original name of this hill be the etymology of the Greek word for wolf, lykos, because that’s where the early Athenians most frequently encountered them? In a similar context, the word lyceum, is definitely connected to the Greek word for wolf, alluding to wolfishness, but referring to a garden of the god Apollo who was said to be wolfish in Greek mythology…

Near-expert friend, Penelope Wilson, tells me she can corroborate, or perhaps, rather complicate! For Lycabettus, apart from the mastoid suggestion others have proposed something to do with luke (light), obviously also associated with Apollo. But, the Ancient Greeks were very good at holding more than one meaning in their heads at a time, and there are puns on Apollo Lukeios as meaning (born from/slayer of) wolves and as god of light. Anyway, she tells me, wolves are definitely there, etymology is attested from classical times. The hill itself was only named or identified with ancient Lycabettus in the 19th C it was previously known as Hill of St George or Mount Aghesmos.

That latter point suggests that the etymology is of the hill’s name not of the word wolf, in that case, but wolfishness is definitely part of the play. It’s still more complicated as Dr Wilson expands via a link to the page for the Lycabettus Run.

Myself and Mrs Sciencebase finally made it back to Greece after far too long a break from that beautiful country. The trip was to be yoga, walking, and wildlife, with plenty of wonderful food, a lot of Greek beer, and far too many photographs. I took the equivalent of eight 36-exposure reels on average each day of a ten-day trip, thank goodness for digital and 64 gigabyte SD cards. Anyway, before we hit the island of Kithira for the aforementioned R&R, we spent three nights in Athens, a place we had meant to visit properly back in the early 1990s, but a trip we missed out on because of ferry delays, force 6 gales, and a 10-30 metre swell!

Here are a few of my snaps from our first couple of days in the Greek capital

A sunny Saturday morning, local church opens its doors for a historical tour and a chance for the lay public to climb the stairs of the bell tower to the  roof and take in the fenland vista with views stretching to Ely Cathedral northwards, King’s College Chapel and the University Library in Cambridge to the south and the surrounding villages, farms, fens, and windfarms. Oh, and there was some wildlife, pigeon eggs on the roof and a bat in the belfry.

I could waffle on about the materials used in modern tennis rackets, the balls, the clothes the players wear, the compounds they used to weed and feed the grass courts, but I won’t here, just for the sake of it, are a few snaps from a trip to Wimbledon myself and Mrs Sciencebase made this week. All shot on my relatively old Panasonic DMC-TZ35 Lumix with the Leica lens and the 20x optical zoom.

I’ve just been watching a video that was downloadable from a link in a practical photography magazine. There was a professional photographer discussing zoom lenses and how they work on different types of camera and their pros and cons for photographing birds and other wildlife. He kept talking about “reach”.

The idea that if you put the same zoom lens on a full-frame camera (one with a sensor the size of an old 35mm type film camera) then your zoom is the equivalent of what it says on the dial. A 400mm zoom means a 400mm zoom on a full-frame camera. But, put the same lens on a camera with a smaller sensor (some times referred to as a crop sensor) and the same subject photographed from the same distance with the same zoom will fill more of the frame, they say, claiming it therefore has more reach. Depending on how much smaller the sensor you could see that 400mm lens looking at the distant subject as if it were a 600mm.

This is deceived wisdom, a myth, bovine ordure.

The same lens on the smaller sensor does indeed fill more of the frame, that is because the frame is that much smaller, not because the lens is somehow zooming in further or magnifying the subject. What is actually happening is that you’re not gaining zoom, you are narrowing the field of view. When you get back from the shoot, you can crop that full-frame photo in your image editing software to give you the same narrowed field of view. That is the equivalent of doing a digital zoom on a pocket camera as opposed to actual optical zoom and taking the snapshot.

There are, of course, differences in quality of full-frame and crop sensors and pixel count and pixel count to take into account when discussing the actual quality. However, given that, in general, full-frame cameras are targeted at the more pro than the consumer end of the market, the vast majority have a better sensor, better focusing, and better frame rate for so-called burst mode, when compared to crop sensor cameras. Things do change but the laws that apply to the branch of physics known as optics do not change just because you swap cameras.

Oh, the other thing that irritated me was that they were photographing birds from a bird hide, but they kept poking their lens out of the hide windows. Not the done thing. Kingfishers have pretty much 360-degree vision, you keep everything within the hide (lenses, hands, tongues etc) while observing QUIETLY!

First trip out with the lensball to a specific location – the public art installation at Tubney Fen just before you get to the Reach Bridge over Reach Lode that takes you into Burwell Fen and thence Wicken Fen. The sculpture, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post shows a fen skater, an eel catcher, and an entomologist with a butterfly net, all important historical and perhaps still even contemporary fenland characters.

The main purpose of today’s trip was a long walk with Mrs Sciencebase, a chance to see Short-eared Owls (might have seen one in the distance) and a pub lunch (The excellent Maid’s Head in Wicken, served the purpose given that The Anchor in Burwell was closed for a private wake.

The birding list for today’s visit to Tubney, Burwell, and Wicken Fen included: Pale Common Buzzard (not Rough-legged, sadly), Kestrel, Short-eared Owl (possible), Whooper Swan, Mute Swan, Shoveler, Little Egret, Grey Heron, Greylag Geese, Canada Geese, Starling, Carrion Crow, Rook, Jackdaw, Lapwing, Great-spotted Woodpecker, Black-headed Gull, Stonechat, Reed Bunting, Meadow Pipit, Fieldfare, Redwing, Skylark, Goldfinch, Greenfinch, Blackbird, Wren, Robin, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Long-tailed Tit, Linnet, Magpie, Mallard, Wigeon, Tufted Duck, Wood Pigeon, House Sparrow, Domestic Dove.