Seen in our garden in Riviersonderend
Cape White Eye
Cape Sparrow on the grape vine
Red Bishop
Categories
Garden Birds
Category: Photography
Categories
Cold Front Arriving
September was remarkable for the cold fronts that hit Cape Town. This gif was done early in the month before familiarity bred disinterest.
Categories
Moon Jupiter Conjunction
Recently there was a moon Jupiter conjunction. A wonderful sight.
It gave me a chance to brush up on my astro-photography
Categories
Putty Rubber
This is my first attempt at stop motion movies and I learnt a number of things.
1 Putty rubbers can be used effectively to create a character who moves
2 It takes time to photograph a sequence. This 18 second sequence took 20 minutes to photograph.
3 Always use a tripod. No matter how still you think your hand is and how accurate your alignment is, it isn’t any of those things.
4 The type of light you use to illuminate the scene can make a huge difference to the colour of the product. I like the effect of this long life bulb. I had fun No sound yet but watch this space.
Categories
Conjunction
Tonight the moon is 98% full. Close by are Saturn and Jupiter. And ideal photo opportunity you might say but there were clouds and aerosols so I did not get a hard classical astro-photograph but a dreamy, ephemeral image. I used a little point and shoot camera and it exceeded my expectations.
Categories
Gymnogene
Or African Harrier Hawk. We occasionally see this magnificent raptor in the Cape Town CBD. This time a neighbour spotted the bird and called us. It was sheltering from a Cape winter storm in a palm tree. I managed to get some pictures. The problem was that it was quite dark and rainy. Also the neighbour had fire burning and the smoke drifted across our line of sight. The troubles of birding photography.
Categories
Kayaks
A man prepares kayaks on a Mouille Point beach.
Categories
Reflections
On a walk around Cape Town I took a picture of a church door. Only when I got home did I see that Table Mountain was reflected in the window panes above the door.
The Moon and Venus were extremely close on 19 June, 2020 and I was lucky to capture some images.
Categories
Processing RAW Photographs
They say you should should only photograph using RAW images but I have not put any effort into learning the processing packages. A recent picture of a Juvenile Fiscal Flycatcher had bad contrast and lighting, It was ideal for post-processing using DarkTable. The result was pleasantly surprising. Here are the results of my initial efforts. Probably with more practice the results will be better, but I am quite pleased with what I achieved.
This is the original pictures. Note how little detail is visible on the back of the bird and how the colours are muted.
Here is the same picture after processing. The difference is quite marked.