A simple giraffe to end the day.
2020-03-09: Monochrome Monday
A gentle giant to start the week.
2020-03-04: Wordless Wednesday
2020-03-02: Monochrome Monday
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.
I hope you enjoy – happy Monday!
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.
2020-02-26: Wordless Wednesday
2020-02-24: Monochrome Monday
I’m pretty sure this was the facial expression I had when I woke up thinking it was Sunday, but then realized it is in fact Monday. Oops!
Have a great week everyone!
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.
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!
2020-02-19: Wordless Wednesday
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!
