The Botanic Gardens 22 July 2009

MY LEAST FAVOURITE CAMERA WAS WHAT I USED

• Botanic Gardens 22 July 2009
• Claremont Beach In Howth
• Howth Photographed 2009
• January 2018 Visit To Howth
• Malahide And Portmarnock 2018
• Dublin Northside
• Luigi Malone In Limerick Had Ceased Trading
• Richard Harris And The Other Public Statues Of Limerick
• The Terry Wogan Sculpture
• Clare Street Park
• The Anthony Foley Memorial
• Derelict Site On Dock Road
• The City Of Limerick 2014 - 2026
• June 2015 Visit To Limerick
• June 2016 Visit To Limerick
• Bridges Of Limerick
• Public Art In Limerick
• Religion Limerick Style
• Exploring Thomas Hill And Carrigeen Park
• Actual Physical Walls Of Waterford
• The Highly Recommended Medieval Museum
• David Maker And The Museum Of Time
• Ireland's National Horological Museum
• Is This Public Art Or A Rusty Metal Yoke
• Huge Canvas For Some Amazing Murals
• Two Spacer Murals By Shane Sutton
• The Quays by Dan Kitchener

The Botanic Gardens 22 July 2009

The National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, remain one of Ireland’s premier botanical institutions and historic designed landscapes. Spanning nearly 20 hectares along the River Tolka, the gardens showcase historic Victorian glasshouses, extensive arboreta, formal borders, and crucial national research facilities including the National Herbarium.

Core Highlights & Overview

• Architectural Heritage: Home to iconic wrought-iron glasshouses, most notably Richard Turner’s Curvilinear Range (1843–1869) and the Great Palm House (1884).
• Botanical Collections: Features over 15,000 plant species and cultivars, encompassing systematic family plots (the Order Beds), the Rock Garden, native Irish flora zones (including Burren calcicolous plant displays), and extensive Rhododendron and conifer collections.

Research & Heritage: Houses the National Herbarium with over 600,000 dried plant specimens and serves as a focal point for plant conservation and education under the Office of Public Works (OPW).

Changes and Evolutions Since 2009

If you are comparing current views against photographs captured in 2009, the overall layout and core historic structures remain intact, but several specific architectural, horticultural, and infrastructural changes have taken place:

Glasshouse & Lodge Conservation:

• While major structural restorations of the Curvilinear Range (1995) and the Great Palm House (2004) preceded 2009, subsequent rolling OPW conservation projects have addressed secondary structures, including maintenance of the Cactus & Succulent House, Alpine House, and ongoing refurbishment of the historic gate lodges and cast-iron entrance railings.

Tolka Riverbank & Flood Management:

• Works along the northern perimeter by the River Tolka have modified path access, bank stabilisation, and riparian planting to manage seasonal water-level fluctuations.

Biodiversity & Naturalistic Management:

• In line with national pollinator and biodiversity action frameworks, maintenance along meadows, woodland margins, and lawn borders has shifted noticeably towards reduced mowing schedules, wildflower integration, and expanded native habitat beds.

Art Installations & Displays:

• The gardens regularly host seasonal outdoor art exhibitions (such as Sculpture in Context), which introduce temporary pieces, while various permanent sculptural additions and memorial tree placements have evolved across the lawns and wooded avenues over the past decade and a half.

Digitisation & Scientific Enhancements:

• Behind the scenes, the Herbarium and visitor facilities have expanded digital access, with high-resolution specimen archiving initiatives (such as DigiHerb) documenting the historic collections.

So What About The Turtles?

The turtles found basking in the pond at the National Botanic Gardens (as well as sites like the Phoenix Park and The Lough in Cork) are pond sliders (Trachemys scripta, including red-eared and yellow-bellied sliders). These non-native terrapins were originally discarded pets dumped into public waterways when they outgrew domestic tanks. While Ireland's temperate climate prevents them from breeding successfully in the wild, adult terrapins are remarkably hardy and can survive in Irish ponds for decades.

The Regulatory Context & Removal

• EU Invasive Alien Species (IAS) Regulation (1143/2014): All subspecies of pond sliders are formally designated as Invasive Species of Union Concern.

• Duty to Eradicate / Control: Under Article 17 of EU Regulation 1143/2014, EU member states are required to apply rapid detection and eradication or management measures. The National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) issued Early Detection Notifications to bodies managing public water features—including the Office of Public Works (OPW) for the Botanic Gardens—mandating their capture and removal.

• Ecological Impact: Because adult terrapins are predatory and omnivorous, their presence in urban ponds disrupts native aquatic ecosystems. They compete with native waterfowl and aquatic life, prey on small fish, frogs, and waterbird chicks, disturb nesting sites by using them for basking, and carry potential pathogen risks.

• Trapping and removal protocols are deployed by wildlife authorities and rescue organisations to humanely remove and rehome surviving specimens to secure, biosecure enclosures.

• In practice, the situation is an ongoing operational challenge rather than a completed eradication.

Active Trapping and Removals: The Office of Public Works (OPW), in conjunction with the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and local authorities under the Local Biodiversity Action Fund, has carried out targeted trapping programmes to capture and remove reported terrapins from the pond. Captured specimens are transferred to secure sanctuaries or captive care rather than culled.

Why They Still Occasionally Appear: Despite eradication mandates, complete clearance has proved difficult to maintain for two reasons:

• Evasion: Pond sliders are wary, agile swimmers that dive into deep silt and dense aquatic vegetation at the slightest disturbance, making standard netting or basking traps tricky to execute reliably.

• Re-introduction: The primary source is illegal domestic dumping. Even after existing individuals are trapped out, new unwanted pet turtles are occasionally released into the pond by members of the public.

• While substantial removal efforts have taken place and official policy requires their extraction upon identification, occasional individual sliders still crop up basking on logs or island edges on warm summer days.

Reworking And Reprocessing My Catalogues

These photographs date from July 2009 when I was using my least favourite camera - that does not mean that was the worst, the problem was that I did not like it.

I am working my way through my 2008 catalogue and to date I have located 14,567 and only 548 were capture using the LX2. 463 were captured the original Canon 5D which was my best camera. What really surprised me is that 12,480 were produced using the Canon 1Ds MkIII which proved to have an inbuilt auto-focus defect.

Now that I am devoting time to my back-catalogue I am beginning to think about the future and it is complicated and very uncertain an potentially very expensive

The Future Of Photography

The enthusiast digital photography ecosystem has collided with a structural wall. What began in the 2000s as an era of rapid democratization has transitioned into a classic late-stage technology plateau, compounded by aggressive component inflation and diminishing returns in software engineering.

Tracing this trajectory from the Hi-Fi boom of the late 1970s through early personal computing to modern 100MP medium-format sensors reveals clear patterns for where this industry is heading.

1. The Software Plateau and the "AI" Marketing Mirage

• RAW processors—Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, and ON1—have solved the fundamental problems of demosaicing, optical correction, and dynamic range recovery. Having reached baseline optical perfection, developers face a classic software dilemma: how to justify continuous subscription cycles or annual upgrade fees.
• Superficial "AI" Feature Creep: Much of the current wave of machine learning features consists of marginal conveniences (automated sky masks, generative distraction removal, or basic object selection) rather than core photographic innovation. These tools cater to high-volume commercial turnaround rather than the craft of raw conversion.
• Format & Workflow Bloat: Features like Lightroom's AI Denoise or Lens Blur forcing intermediate "Save as Linear DNG" files illustrate the architectural exhaustion of these platforms. Instead of non-destructive mathematical instructions applied on the fly, software now generates 16-bit uncompressed or demosaiced DNG files 3× to 4× the size of the original RAW file—creating massive storage bloat simply to preserve an algorithmic state.

2. The Data Footprint vs. The Memory Cost Wall

• The hardware stack required to process modern enthusiast photography has severed ties with consumer budgets:
• Massive Sensor Payloads: Flagship bodies like the Leica Q3, Sony α1 II / α7R V, and Fujifilm GFX100 series generate individual RAW files between 80MB and 220MB. When combined with linear DNG derivatives, caches, and multi-tier backups, a single outing can easily consume 50GB to 100GB of active disk space.
• The NAND Flash Squeeze: Global NAND and DRAM production has been disproportionately reallocated to enterprise data centers and hyperscale AI accelerators. Consumer NVMe drives and high-speed external enclosures (like high-end Lexar, SanDisk Professional, and OWC units) have seen dramatic price surges across 2025–2026, tripling retail prices from reasonable €400 tiers to upwards of €1,200+.

Apple Silicon's High-Spec Trap: Apple’s unified memory architecture offers remarkable memory bandwidth, but soldered RAM and non-upgradable internal SSDs mean properly configured Mac Studio Ultras or MacBook Pros carry prohibitive upgrade premiums that scale exponentially for high-memory workflows.

3. The Historical Parallels: Hi-Fi, Microcomputers, and Cameras The trajectory of digital photography mirrors previous hardware revolutions almost exactly: [Phase 1: Pure Innovation] -> [Phase 2: Golden Enthusiast Era] -> [Phase 3: Commodification / Bifurcation]

• Hi-Fi (1960s-1970s)
• Personal Computing (1980s)
• Digital Photography (2004-Present)

Hi-Fi Audio (1960s–1980s): In the 1960s and 1970s, component Hi-Fi (discrete pre-amps, reel-to-reel, precision turntables) was an intellectual, accessible hobby for the middle class. By the time commodification set in around 1980, the market split into two distinct realities: cheap mass-market all-in-one shelf systems for the general public, and stratospherically expensive audiophile exotica for a tiny demographic.

Personal Computing (1981–2000s): Early PC enthusiasts built, tuned, and maintained modular rigs. Eventually, computing matured into an invisible appliance: standard laptops, smartphones, and closed operating systems where tweaking yielded negligible real-world returns.

Digital Photography (2004–2026): Photography underwent the same curve. The smartphone wiped out the entry-level consumer camera market, leaving camera manufacturers to survive exclusively on high-margin, ultra-high-resolution pro/enthusiast hardware.

4. Predictions: Where the Industry Goes From Here

• The collision of prohibitive storage economics, high-end camera hardware, and stagnating software will likely drive several shifts:

• The Curatorial Contraction (Return to Intentionality): The shoot-to-fill approach enabled by cheap storage is becoming economically unsustainable.

• Enthusiasts and small studios will shift back to aggressive on-import culling, shooting fewer frames, and archiving only final 16-bit master exports rather than retaining hundreds of gigabytes of raw bursts.

• Bifurcated Storage Architectures: The all-NVMe workflow will remain reserved for active client scratch disks. Photographers will increasingly move toward tiered cold storage: high-density enterprise spinning platters (HDDs), optical/LTO solutions, or strict offline archival tiers to bypass the NAND price spike.

• The "Good Enough" Hardware Freeze: Upgrading compute platforms every 2 to 3 years will grind to a halt. Machines like the M3 Ultra or M4-generation hardware will remain in active service for 6 to 8 years, as raw CPU/GPU gains now vastly exceed the incremental performance demands of still-image editing.

The "Veblen Good" Transition: High-end photography gear (Leica, Hasselblad, high-tier Sony/Fuji medium format) will completely abandon pretence as mass-market hobbies. They will operate under the luxury mechanical watch paradigm—low-volume, handcrafted physical precision whose value lies in the shooting experience rather than software gimmicks.

SAILING AND BOATING IN HOWTH

THE LEGACY CATALOG

* In The Year 2008 * In The Year 2011 * In The Year 2017 * Henrietta Back In 2010