If you’re ok to completely abandon any hope of ever owning your own home, the smashed avocado on sourdough toast @rust.coffee.bar here in Observatory is really damn good. That’s a joke, of course - based on some inequality-justifying hack’s ludicrous argument for why millennials don’t own homes. But not joking about the yumminess of this toast.
More experiments with retro wildlife photography. These are plains zebras - the more common of the two species of zebra in South Africa. This one is widespread throughout the continent South of the Sahara. There is one more species that is deeply endangered that survives only in small, protected enclaves in Kenya and Sudan.
The calming summer scene of cricketers in their whites. A sport like no other - as if concocted by Oscar Wylde on a hashish binge. Apologists for the brutal British Empire like to pretend they bestowed all kinds of gifts on the colonies they looted (funny how Japan has all those things anyway despite never being colonised). But the only thing that probably wouldn’t be here had they not been that’s worth a damn is the game of cricket.
The Cape Buffalo - or African Buffalo. It has a far more violent reputation than most of its Asian cousins - especially the Water Buffalo which has been widely domesticated and provides mozzarella for your pizza. This buffalo has never been domesticated. It’s simply too strong and fierce. Of course they start off pretty cute.
Looking at some of my ‘B’ selections from our recent Kruger Park trip. This was more experimentation with my ultra cheap ttartisan 50mm f1.2 on my Fujifilm XE1 - shooting wide open to get a mid 20th C bushveld look. You can see the vintage lens design in this brand new lens in the slightly odd character of the out-of-focus parts of the image.
A day yesterday with long tall Jay. His kids were very kind and let us watch our Velvet Underground documentary as long as we were quiet. After my comical series of mishaps, I finally made it out to Noordhoek only by [smartphone taxi-service] but it was well worth it. The leafy hide of the peninsula is on display out there. And the spring clouds were fierce and judgemental.
I don’t know why I started thinking about this picture. Tibetan monks in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India, reading from old books in the Tibetan script. Maybe books that they smuggled out of Tibet after the Chinese takeover. One of the things that always put me off was a very unfortunate tendency by my Nikon F100 to leave a scratch across the film - a slender straight black line caused by the film being pulled across some piece of grit on the pressure plate. I can get rid of it with a bit of work, but I’d always just move on. Now it maybe seems like part of the nostalgia for these pictures.
A #latergram of an Indian takeaway feast in the Jozi home of our dear friends @sophdex and @ezlemoen with parents, Jill and Pierre, and collies, airedales, and cats. Johannesburg doesn’t look nearly as welcoming in spring compared to summer. But get indoors and the citizens (not just our friends) are as friendly as ever. Shooting scenes like this in available darkness is a big part of what makes having a fast wide-angle lens such a pleasure.
Pity about the shadows. But a very rare picture of these two eccentric gents in the wild: Gareth and Marcus (with beard!). I’ve quoted Hunter Thompson with regard to Gareth before, but it goes for both of them: “Too strange to live. Too rare to die.
I took many hundreds of pictures of Skitten since 2007. But this was the very last one. When we first got it home from Maatjiesfontein, I was convinced that we didn’t need a third cat. I took the cutest pictures I could of it parading about to make into a collage to advertise it… and in so doing it tricked me into falling in love with it. It liked to sit on windowsills and contemplate the world going by. A most philosophical animal.