From fancy nonsense about old film cameras to a good old phone pic. Had the old man around for lunch and @withoutaleaf introduced him to phō 🍲 I’ve been indulging in 80s nostalgia this weekend. I watched Cobra with Stallone for the first time since I saw it on vhs in about ‘87. Today I watched Pretty In Pink (great but WTAF with those last five minutes?) and we’re going to check out Desperately Seeking Susan properly on my old projector now now. Mostly enjoying catching up on iconic ‘80s movie moments I missed or was too young for at the time.

It’s the F again. Posting this because I had such a good time shooting it today walking around the dam at Silvermine with my dad. Suddenly it all came together and it felt just great using it with this set of lenses. Putting it on a tripod and scanning the edges of the 100% finder. It felt wonderfully deliberate and focused. I shot about 20 frames and I’m really looking forward to seeing the results. ...

@awesomemeerkat told me about some nesting owls at Kirstenbosch and a friend helped locate them. My dad and I went and took some pictures and just enjoyed being so close to wild owls. I didn’t get any good ones of the chick. But we’ll go back.

Karooveld

Not too much call for mowing the lawn in camp at The Karoo National Park. This is a big old Mountain Tortoise about the size of a medicine ball. It let me take a few pics before it started to feel it was infra dig, hissed at me and then trundled off to continue harvesting.

The big tree. One of the few old yellowwood trees that survived the clear cutting. There’s been a lot of replanting and preservation to try to undo the damage of colonial exploitation of resources - the same kind of exploitation still going on full-tilt in Central Africa. This is another one from my expired film test in Knysna back in September with @sophdex and Jinty and Jinty’s wonderful kids. This was also the first real test of using the F100 with the modern 24-120 stabilised lens - getting sharp results at 1/15th of a second handheld. There are only a handful of Nikon film cameras that can use stabilised lenses. Quite a few Canons though, I believe.

Bun staying out of the summer breeze through the open window by making rare use of this cat tower room that was once the fave of our dear departed Skitten.

And a few horizontal ones also from our first braai of summer. It feels like it’s really here now.

Some pics from our first braai of the summer, kindly hosted by @johnthevudio Swimming, good food, nice whiskey, birds and summer breezes, and loads of cute cats.

Boi’s official spring portrait We did some wild gardening today helping Nicola in her mad dash to empty out her Gran’s house of 30 years before the bulldozers come for it - rescuing a few lucky plants.