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.
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.
Much like yesterday, today also felt like a perfect day to share an elephant image.
This was shot while staying at Lion Sands Tinga Lodge. We couldn’t go on a game drive without seeing elephants, sometimes an immense number of them, which our guide kept commenting on. It made me incredibly happy, since they are my favourite animal to spend time with our on safari.
An elephant calf makes a quick meal stop in the middle of the road.
Today felt like the perfect day to share some elephant pictures 🙂 Basically, if the day ends in Y, I think elephant images are just right!
My editing software had a bit of a meltdown trying to open one of the raw files to edit; I have no idea what was going on, as the images before and after were fine. Thankfully, I have lots of back ups, and after deleting the file and reloading it, everything was okay. Public service message for the day – always make sure you have a backup of your data!
I hope you enjoy, wishing you a fantastic week ahead.
An elephant enjoying a drink from a rather large puddle.Look at the curled trunk 🙂Feeding time for big and little.An elephant drinks while a herd of buffalo graze the banks of the river.A tiny face peeking out from under Mom.
I don’t think I have a ton of overlap between blog followers and Instagram followers, so today I decided to share some monochrome elephant images that have been seen before on Instagram over the years, but not here.
Before I get to the images I created for this post, my public service announcement for the day: Always make sure you have a backup of your computer! I made the decision to upgrade my Mac to a new operating system (not the newest one just released, the one before that, as I thought all the bugs would be worked out). Partway through the install, there was a failure and I ended up with a totally dead computer. Thankfully, I have a pretty good backup strategy, so all I lost was the edit on a single image… And I wasn’t really that happy with the edit, so it isn’t really much of a loss. I didn’t get to spend my afternoon editing as my computer was busy doing its own thing with the restore function. But if I hadn’t had that, I would have spent the day seriously freaking out.
Anyways, on to the topic at hand. I was playing around with elephant images this week, creating some of what I call my photo art or artistic impressions images. I love elephants as the subject for these types of creations, as their large size allows the subject to still be recognizable, no matter how crazy I go with different filters, textures and techniques.
I had a lot of fun working on these, I hope you enjoy them too.
It seems like it has been a while since I have played around with tinted monochrome images. This elephants looked good in black and white, but felt better with the warmer, coffee tones you see below. These were taken on different days, but all fairly late in the morning, when the sun was casting harsh shadows. Conventional wisdom says that’s the time to put away the camera, but I’ll keep shooting as long as there is something interesting to look at. The bulk of an elephant and the highly textured skin seem to be able to handle harsh light quite well.
