Yes. It’s possible I may never photograph anything besides cats again. @withoutaleaf made a little tent on the couch for them in this cold weather.

We’re having a late winter cold snap.

Portrait of a handsome chap.

#throwbackthursday One of the many other gorgeous buildings at the Taj Mahal complex built by Shah Jehan in the city of Agra. Northern spring, 2005.

#throwbackthursday The world’s biggest surviving bird - and the world’s biggest surviving dinosaur - enjoying a dust bath after a long day of grumpy peckin’. @withoutaleaf and I went to Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in 2008, I think. A spectacular piece of Southern Africa. Until quite recently it was one of the only places in which the world’s oldest culture, the Bushman hunter-gatherers, could still practise their traditional way of life - until the Botswana government kicked them out.

And now it’s a series. Trinket is enjoying the plushness of the winter duvet for her daytime snooze. I’m using all manual everything here. I don’t say that as a brag, but to reflect on how easy it is with a ‘modern’ mirrorless camera. There are a couple of new developments that excite me in this regard. The one is the massive viewfinder resolution and magnification of Sony’s latest camera. Over 2000 pixels across and 90% magnification. That’s like the best of both worlds. The what-you-see-is-what-you-get of mirrorless with all the fine visible detail of an optical viewfinder, plus the large size via the magnification of the best old film SLRs. That will make manual focusing even easier on mirrorless cameras. And then I’ve found out a Chinese company that’s made a knockoff of Leica’s 50mm f0.95 Nocton lens. The Leica costs $13,000 (no that’s not a typo). The TTartisans 50mm f0.95 costs $750 (that’s not a typo either) and seems to have better centre sharpness in tests than the Leica. Since Leica mount to mirrorless camera adaptors are tiny, it’d make the perfect portrait lens for a Fuji camera. But that gold-leaf thin depth of field at f0.95 would really be helped by a large, high-res viewfinder to aid focusing. Great times for users of dedicated cameras even as people are writing hot-takes about their death.

Poll: Who thinks we need to clean the windows after a third of a year of deadly epidemic. Comment below to cast your important vote. Nothing for six weeks and then two Trinkets in a row. Being less sneaky. She likes to hold a little vigil in the morning when the sun is diffusing so beautifully through the build-up of gunge on the windows. Probably making sure the street isn’t full of sneks. She’s very concerned about sneks, this one.

Not a single pic posted in July. Well, I’ve not gone more than a handful of kilometres from home. I’ll probably be one of those people with no pictures of this time that anyone in the future could recognise as being from the pandemic. But then I suppose there’ll be no shortage of pics of empty streets and masked faces. I’ll be pleased to look back at a picture of Trinket spotted through the kitchen window getting up to sneaky shenanigans.

Sekrit boi. June gets surprisingly cold in winter in Cape Town because our houses aren’t heated. So though it’s not cold in the big sense, your house becomes really damn cold. But this boi knows how to deal with it.

Eid Mubarak. While I’m not a big fan of religions in general, I do have a huge fondness for Islamic architecture. So I thought this might be a good day for this. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful mosques in the world - from the ‘Blue’ mosque in Istanbul, to the jaw-dropping Jama Masjid in Old Delhi designed by Shah Jahaan of Taj Mahal fame. I adore our strange early Cape Town mosques. But I think my favourite of all time might be this humble mosque in the centre of Chefchaouen, Morocco. Sitting lunching in that sunny square in that beautiful town in the Rif mountains, this typical Moroccan mosque with its geometric minarette watched over @furiousgreencloud and I as I recovered my sanity there for ten wonderful days in 1999. African, Maghrebbi skies provide the perfect backdrop. Hoping my Muslim friends feast to bursting point after a fast in the most difficult conditions.