Birds of prey. Look at me getting ambitious with some amateurish cutting. These were all filmed in Kruger years ago. Featured birds: African Fish Eagle, the fearsome and mighty Martial Eagle, the Giant Eagle Owl (now called Verreaux’s Eagle Owl), the Bateleur - the skymaster - and the… Wahlberg’s Eagle? Fun fact: I know how to talk to Giant Eagle Owls. That Owl was responding to me talking to it. ...

Here’s another one of Trinket. Taken about this time yesterday when the late sun comes washing through the window of the little room where I work currently. Sometimes she visits and greatly enjoys standing on the table completely obscuring the screen and keyboard. But then sometimes she sits in the window and photosynthesises - as cats do. Got the Nikon adapter so I’m trying a very old Nikkor 50mm f1.4 instead of the Olympus Zuiko 50mm f1.8 I’ve been using for cat portraits ’til now. ...

It’s the sleepiest time of the day for the crepuscular ones.

Young lions being sweet. This is a bit unusual to see. 90% of the time lions do nothing at all. 8% of the time they’re terrifying murder-machines that set our ancient alert system on defcon GTFO. All their other behaviour fits in that last bit. If this seems a weird environment for a wild lion outside India, this is what the bushveld looks like after heavy rains. Kruger is mostly described as, “savannah woodland,” with plenty of large trees. This was in December 2013. ...

Handsome boi. Wait for it… I thought I’d lost these clips. One of those times where you see something spectacular between entering Kruger and getting to camp. This was on the way to Pretoriuskop from Numbi Gate, I think. 2014. Prolly should have cropped this for insta. Oh well.

Another one of Hillbrow from Constitution Hill in Jan 2019. I took this with a lens not much newer than these flats - a Nikkor 105mm f2.5 from the ’70s. Such a killer lens. Anyone using Nikon SLRs or DSLRs should try get one. They’re not very expensive. Wonderful cheap portrait lens for full-frame - flattening features and separating from the background with its shallow depth-of-field at f2.5. And I found endless other uses for it too. ...

#jozi My dad has been posting some of his pics from Hilbrow and Berea in the 1960s when he lived there. This is Hilbrow now. It doesn’t look like all that much to people in many places around the world - really just some grubby 50s-70s high-rises. But Johannesburg is unique in Africa for having a true ‘urban jungle.’ Nowhere else has such a concentration of tall buildings - not Cairo. Not Lagos. It was all built on the gold dug far beneath the Earth by workers treated as less-than second-class citizens sweltering in the darkness. ...

This hefty chap standing guard as the herd comes down to the river. Shot this in Dec 2013. One day I’ll learn Da Vinci and make some small films from the footage I’ve shot in Kruger.

Ah took a wee pitcher ay t’min. Aw the time stairin doon at us.

Since I’m going to be home alone with no one to annoy, this seems like a good chance to record my real amp. They’ve gone an amazing way towards perfectly simulating vacuum tube amplifiers now. But they still suffer from the problem where you have to dial in the settings for a particular thing say, lead on the bridge pickup, that then won’t sound great playing rhythm on the neck pickup with the volume rolled back on the guitar. The original 1940s tech does not suffer from this problem. A good, 1960s style tube-amp with a great loudspeaker, and a good guitar with great pickups, and you need to work pretty hard to make it sound less than great. I want to record an old Otis Redding number that really needs me to be able to switch between stuff on the guitar.