Category: Wildlife

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2020-03-01: Leopards at night

Leopards are generally more active at night than during the daytime, which can make for challenging, yet thrilling, sightings when you are out on a game drive.  I am always interested first in enjoying the sighting, with the photos coming second, but that’s not to say that I don’t like to try and capture images under these more challenging conditions.

Conditions vary whether it is dawn / dusk or at night; dawn and dusk images may be able to be captured with the ambient light available, but will generally need a really high ISO and as such be noisy.  Those captured after dark will generally be lit by spot light, sometimes with a red filter, so there can be strange colour casts, blown out highlights and all sorts of other challenges.   But, if you are capturing images in that situation, you are witnessing an apex predator in its natural environment, and what could be better than that?

I hope you enjoy my selection of images for the day; wishing everyone a great week, and a great month ahead.

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2020-02-23: Heading into the photo vault

I have some bird images that I took on my first trip to Africa, which I printed to fill a frame with 4 – 5″ x 5″ openings. While I see it every day, I haven’t really given it much thought in years.  But today when I looked at it, I wondered if with the skills and software I have now, I could improve upon those images.

All of these were shot in raw format with a Nikon D5100 with a 55-300mm kit lens.  I did the best I could at the time with editing them, but we all know that software has come a long way in the last 6 years, not to mention there has been a ton of room for improvement in my skills with editing (and still so much to learn).

A lot of these were taken during the harsh light of midday; but when you are out and about, you shoot what you see, when you see it.  You never know if you’ll even see the same species of bird again, let alone have another opportunity to photograph it.  And as it stands, after 6 trips to Africa, I have only seen carmine bee-eaters on that very first trip while in Zambia, so I am glad I did capture what images I could 🙂

For each image, first is the original edit, and second is the updated edit.

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A lilac breasted roller in flight.  A challenge I still enjoy trying to capture; these are my favourite bird.

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A red bishop in breeding plumage.  

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A pair of blue-cheeked bee-eaters.

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A flock of carmine bee-eaters.

I think in every case, the re-edit made substantial improvement.  As soon as I remember to pick up a replacement light magenta ink cartridge for my printer, I am going to reprint these and replace the original images in that old frame.

I have a few other ideas of images I would like to explore from my archive, so watch this space in the coming weeks and months.

Have a great week!

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2020-02-17: Monochrome Monday

Another week begins!  I was scanning through my image catalogue and a zebra image caught my eye, so I decided to go with that for my monochrome Monday post.

I don’t have any interesting tidbits to share about zebras today, just a few images.  I’m sure if you wanted to know interesting facts about zebras, you could head on over to Wikipedia and learn everything you wanted to know, and then some 🙂  I recall watching an episode about them some time ago on the David Attenborough series Natural Curiosities; a great one to tune into if you happen to come across it.

That’s all for today as Spencer is stamping his feet at me, wanting to head out on his afternoon walk.

Hope you have a great week!

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On anyone else, this hair would probably be called a bad dye job.
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You never know who you’ll meet up with on the road while on a game drive.  There were zebra all around the road, and a small group of giraffe off in the distance.
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Just a guess, but I think they heard something towards the left 🙂
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A group of mares pause while a foal has a feed.
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2020-02-16: Elephants

One thing I have really been noticing the last couple of weeks is that I am getting to the end of the day, or the end of the week, long before the end of my to-do list.  It’s one of those things that seems to go in waves for me, and I think while I have my coffee tomorrow morning I need to spend a bit of time figuring out how better to spend my time, so I can still fit in the things that bring me joy, like my photography.

While I have had my computer back a week now, late this afternoon was the first time I have had an opportunity to work on any of my photography.  As such, I wanted to spend the little bit of time I had editing something that I really enjoyed; hence elephants as my topic for today.

These images were all from the first game drive of my last trip to South Africa.  The trip started off with an abundance of elephants, and continued on that way the entire time, much to my delight.  What was also really lovely is we ended up at each camp on a vehicle with safari newbies, and seeing their joy, amazement and excitement when seeing all the animals and birds made the experience all that much more enjoyable for me.

Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead!

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2020-02-10: Monochrome Monday

Happy Monday!  I am super grateful that I was able to get my computer back out of sick bay this weekend, complete with a new SSD drive, so hopefully it’ll be running well for a couple more years (at least).

I got the computer back, but haven’t actually had an opportunity to do anything with it in terms of editing.  Even with the system restore from a backup, there are little quirks that need to be addressed.

So here is a giraffe image I edited a few weeks ago and had ready to go.  These two were part of a group of about 6-8 that were spread out amongst the acacia trees.  We were on our way to check on a lion sighting from the previous day, so we didn’t spend too much time with these guys.  Not that we needed to rush to the lions; they had barely moved since the previous day.

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Wishing everyone a wonderful week!

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