leroo la tau – Jennifer Sawicky Photography

April 8, 2020

2020-04-08: Wordless Wednesday

20200408_WW

February 24, 2019

2019-02-24: Topic of the Month – Warm

When I woke up this morning, it was -28C; decidedly not warm here. But the sun is shining, and bundled up, Spencer and I managed a couple of nice walks today. It still doesn’t feel like spring is around the corner; but hopefully that will change soon.

Last week, I flagged several landscape images from my travels for editing throughout the week, and while working on them, I realized that not only do they all fit into the theme of being taken in warm places, but they were all taken on the fly. If I asked guides to stop every time I saw something interesting, we certainly wouldn’t get very far, so I have become rather comfortable with snapping away out of a moving vehicle. Sometimes it works, and sometimes, not so much.

I hope you enjoy my selection of images this week.

20170425-1020444 — The Hoanib riverbed off in the distance. The shear drop off is the bank of the river, showing just how much water has been through the area at times. When we were visiting, there were only a few small pools, and it had been an exceptionally generous wet season. Namibia, April 2017.

20170425-P1020486 — As the day heats up, the wind in the desert picks up, causing sand storms to whip through. Hoanbia Camp, Namibia. April 017.

20170426-P1020762 — One of the beautiful desert vistas near Hoanib Camp.

20170501-P1020953 — Palm trees are a symbol of a warm climate to me. I love the shape of the leaves, and how they stand out against the sky. This was just before sunset while heading back to Leroo La Tau camp on the Boteti Rover. Botswana, May 2017.

20170503-P1030068 — The Baines Baobabs standing tall in the midday heat. Nxai Pans National park, Botswana.

20170513-DSC_5272-Edit — A beautiful sunrise in the Sabi Sands. The chill of the early morning burnt off in short order once the sun was up. South Africa, May 2017.

January 2, 2019

2019-01-02: Wordless Wednesday

August 15, 2018

2018-08-15: Wordless Wednesday

August 12, 2018

2018-08-12: World Elephant Day

As you all know, I am just a bit partial to elephants, so I wouldn’t mind if every day were elephant day. But today is officially World Elephant Day, so it’s a great opportunity to share some images of my favourite animal.

I won’t get into a discussion on elephant population numbers, conservation challenges and the like. There are many people and groups far more informed than I that are providing that type of information. I’ll simply say that my opinion is that no one needs ivory except an elephant, and the poaching of these magnificent animals is an absolute tragedy that needs to be stopped.

I’m sure I have said this many times before, but if there was only one animal I could spend time with on an African safari, it would be the elephant.

I’ve kept with my theme for the month of August, and have continued to learn and explore the Luminar editing program and all of these images have been processed using the software. Two things I have noticed over the past week:

1) I find the spot removal tool does not work very well for larger dust spots on blue sky; it leaves behind visible traces of the spot removal that are almost more noticeable than the initial spot. I have found though that the clone stamp tool does an effective job on the larger sensor spot removal. The majority of these images were shot on my old Nikon D610, which had enormous issues with sensor spots, so this is a feature I rely on quite heavily for working on older images.

2) The luminosity mask function is quite limited on the current software version, offering no opportunity for adjusting the luminance values to dial in the mask. I use the luminosity masking function a lot when editing with On1 Photo Raw, especially as an effective way to isolate the sky to perform specific adjustments. The standard masking options also feel a bit more basic than the ones that I use with Photo Raw. For images that need that type of adjustment, I don’t think Luminar would be my first choice as a raw editor.

I’m finding that most of the editing is start to feel natural using this program, now that I have gotten a feel for what the various filters do. But coming from Lightroom and On1 Photo Raw, I’m really used to the automatic lens profile corrections, and having to manually enable and adjust that is something I haven’t yet gotten used to doing as part of my workflow. Generally speaking though, I am finding it an enjoyable program to use.

On to the images 🙂