I’ve had some fun over the last few weeks playing around with some images in Topaz Studio and creating a bit of photo art. I had been hoping to get out with my camera and capture some of the new birds I have been seeing around, but the weather has definitely not been conducive to that this week. It seems to be a theme lately that I want to do more with my photography than time allows, but these sort of cycles ebb and flow, and there is no sense in getting all worked up about it. I’m just happy that I have something to share this week.
Leopards are such beautiful creatures! This is Hosana, one of the leopards seen on Safari Live drives on occasion. We spotted him during our last game drive whilst staying at Chitwa Chitwa.
Here are a few images of Mom’s in the bush, all taken during my last trip to South Africa. Looking through my photos brings back such lovely memories, made even better by the fact that I experienced them with my Mom 🙂
I’m working on a guest post for a friend doing an Armchair safari series, and thought I would share the images here as well. I decided that the theme of my post would be sunrise to sunset on safari; showcasing images from dawn till dusk while out in the bush. These are all shot during my last trip to South Africa and were from all of the camps that I stayed at. I would have to plan a lot more in advance while out in the field to have a sunrise to sunset images from a single day (note to self, do that next trip!).
Rather than a highlight reel of amazing sightings, these are just a collection of moments out in the bush.
I hope you enjoy.
6am – Lions. Two of the Torchwood Pride greet each other.7am – Hyena and Impala. A group of impala look on wearily as a hyena approaches down the road.8am – Elephants. A pair of youngsters tussle while the older elephants graze nearby. 9am – Giraffe. A giraffe bull paused in the road allowing me to capture this image while on the way back to camp for breakfast.10am – Waterbuck. A waterbuck heads towards the dam for a drink.11am – Hippos. A group of hippos making their way back to the water to beat the midday heat.12pm – Yellow-billed hornbill. A “flying banana” perched just beyond the deck at camp.1pm – Landscape in infrared. Midday was a great time to wander around camp with my infrared filter and play around with long exposure photos. This was shot from the deck at Lion Sands Tinga Lodge.2pm – Purple Crested Turaco. I tried for ages to capture a good image of this beautiful bird from my balcony, but given they like to be deep in the branches, it really wasn’t meant to be. It was a fun way to spend part of the afternoon though.3pm – Cheetah. We’d only been out on game drive for about 10 minutes when we came across this cheetah, and had the chance to watch her stalking some impala. They spotted her right away so supper wasn’t in her immediate future.4pm – Wild Dog. Spending time with wild dogs always makes my heart happy. We had a good half an hour with them before they took off in all directions, setting out to hunt.5pm – Honey Badgers. I had always wanted to see honey badgers and on my first game drive of the trip I finally had my chance. It only lasted about 30 seconds but it certainly was thrilling, even if all I could get were butt shots!6pm – Leopard. We were heading back to camp for drinks and dinner and came across this leopard heading in to this large puddle to drink. It was a quick stop before the leopard was on its way.
At the start of the month I shared a post with some images of leopards at night and this post is a follow-on to that, showing what images taken with a red spotlight filter look like.
I’ve done a lot of editing in the past of red spotlight filter images to black and white, as I find they turn out to be stunning (there are a few examples of lions at night in my gallery that were done this way) but I wanted to leave these as is, and do the best I could with editing the images, because seeing them this way gives another real life look at what being on safari, and on a night game drive in particular, can be like.
A young female leopard that we came across on our first drive while staying at Lion Sands River Lodge. This had been quite an epic game drive as about 15 minutes before this, I saw my first ever honey badgers!This was a bit of a strange sighting, as we were tracking a leopard (not this one) but the ranger and tracker kept finding confusing tracks that backtracked over each other. We finally found this small female in a tree, with a much larger male on the ground nearby. There was also another male in the area, and once the team figured all that out, the tracks made a whole lot more sense.The red filter puts less strain on the eyes for the animal being viewed, while still allowing for some viewing and photo opportunities. Even with the spotlight, the images I took were between ISO 5000 and ISO 12800. I had a couple even at 25,600, but didn’t select them as there were similar images with less noise, so why go through the extra work?This image is at ISO 12,800 and there is definitely a deterioration in quality compared to some of the others (plus the noise reduction has made the images appear blurry), but the moment here was interesting as this female was about to head down the tree, but then spotted the male still moving below and decided to hold fast awhile longer. She was definitely a very nervous cat.This is one of the males that was involved in all the drama; I didn’t have an opportunity to see the second male as we had had a really interesting sighting and another vehicle showed up with guests that hadn’t seen a leopard yet, so we let them take over our position and carry on trying to track the second male through the bushes. Even a leopard in the dark under red light, is better than no leopard at all. And they did manage to find him and have a quick sighting before heading back to camp for dinner.
I hope you have enjoyed, and wishing you a safe and healthy week ahead. Take care.
This image is a bit of a continuation of yesterday’s Leopards at night theme.
The one difference here is this was shot under a red spotlight, whereas the images shared yesterday were either with a spotlight without a colour filter, or under natural available light. I’ll be working on some more of the images shot under red light shortly, and share them as a separate post.
