Sometimes it's not about the picture

Still without a blip for the day, and deciding against another ominous clouds shot from the house, I thought I'd pop down to the Water of Leith with my 'little camera' to get a quick shot of the presumably rain swollen river, thundering over the weir in "The Cauldron", below the Gallery of Modern Art. In a decision I will continue to regret for sometime, I decided it wasn't worth taking my real camera for such a quick shot. It's just a ten minute walk from the house down to the weir, and I was a tad disappointed when I got there. The river was a little swollen and a deeper brown than usual but the water spilling over the weir didn't look all that impressive through the lens. I walked past the footbridge on the lookout for something interesting to photograph instead and was looking at the impressive, umbrella-like leaves of a riverside plant, when a splash upriver caught my eye. At first I thought it was an upending Mallard, but it seemed to be struggling with a floating log. And then both 'bird' and 'log' disappeared underwater. I moved along the bank to investigate, and couldn't believe my eyes when first one and then another head popped out of the water. A couple of otters!! An adult pair, or siblings, I don't know enough about them. They seemed a fair size. That was me then, for the next half an hour or so, following them as they made their way down the river. I lost them past the Gormley statue, but then found them again the other side of the weir, past the little islands where the stream comes back together. They seemed to be feeding and playing, chasing each other through the water, briefly stopping to feed on something they had caught. One spent a few moments on the opposite bank, allowing me to take a picture, but like the rest it wasn't up to much. The automatic settings decided it needed 1/8 second at f4.9 and 400 ISO. I suppose my real camera would have struggled too. Still without a fast long lens, even ramping up to 6400 ISO would have struggled to get a shutter speed above 1/125. So maybe it wouldn't have made much difference to the quality, exchanging noise for blur. Instead of the static riverbank shot I went for this more blurred one, that seems closer to the excitement of the moment. I was smiling and laughing to myself as I watched them, and only disappointed there were no other walkers passing by to share it with. I'm still buzzing from seeing them. Brilliant. To be able to see creatures like that ten minutes from our front door, in the middle of a city.