Swimming beneath the Stars

The Salthill Swimmerati were out in force early this morning. I arrived at the diving board at the end of Salthill Promenade before 7am, and already, there were men and women wearing little more than a smile to ward off the cold, and getting ready for their regular pre-dawn swim. It was cold this morning – I had to use water to clear the ice off the car windscreen – but it didn’t deter the swimmers. If the picture above looks dark, it is because it was still effectively night when it was taken¹ – the pre-dawn light at the horizon looks brighter in the photo than to the naked eye (the long exposure exaggerates the brightness). The largest spot of light above the swimmer is the waning crescent moon and near it is the planet Venus (on the left). To the right of the moon (and above the left side of the diving board) is Saturn. The line of lights on the horizon are houses on the Clare side of Galway Bay.

¹Modern digital cameras have completely transformed the craft of night and low-light photography. My camera was on a tripod and the exposure was 1 second, which is why the swimmer looks a little blurred (I waited until she paused to take the first step  down to the lower level of the diving board – all the previous swimmers had paused at that point, so I knew it was the only chance of reducing the amount of blur). Even so, the ISO setting was 5000 which is the sort of setting that would have been impossible a decade ago. The diving board looks bright because of the street lights from the Promenade. Such is the sensitivity of modern camera sensors (and my camera – a Canon 7D – is not even a particularly great low-light camera) that one can see stars in the sky. This image was also post-processed in Adobe Lightroom which has a near-magic function to remove much of the noise (i.e. the grainy effect of low light images).