Murphy’s camera
when 28mm is just a touch too wide
Murphy has a lot to answer for. I finally got around to taking a mountain outing with only my Ricoh GR-D, in a pleasant valley in the vicinity of Les Diablerets, Canton Vaud, known, it seems, for its marmot population. This time I had the pleasure of the company of my better half, as well as our Romainian-Canadian friends from Ottawa.
At the highest point of the walk we stopped for a lazy lunch. Adrian wandered over to inspect a patch of snow (apparently they don’t have snow in Canada ?) and rushed back excitedly some time later saying he’d seen “at least 7” marmots.
Well, these marmots had unusually long horns and were the size of a very large sheep. In fact they were a little known variant of marmot, valled “ibex”.
Well, bugger. Ibex are not that common. Relatively approachable ibex even less so. I’ve never managed to get so close without spooking them (about 100m). And I had a 28mm lens…
So, here, for your pleasure, a pair of alpine ibex at 28mm.
Naturally, had I dragged 5kg of image stabilised Olympus E-3 with f2.8-3.5 50-200mm lens up there, would we have met the ibex ? Of course not.
