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Roaming about, photographing small things.

All the thorny acacias in the Karoo are blooming with these tiny yellow pom-pom flowers.

The Red Bishop. There’s great business at the camp’s bird hide. Bishops and Masked Weavers are weaving their nests in the reeds and trying to get takers to lay eggs in them. It’s loud and energetic. The newfangled autofocus was completely bamboozled by the reeds and I had to fall back on manual focus again. Olympus has just brought out a bird-detect AI-driven autofocus mode. Doesn’t sound like it would have fared much better but it points the way the future of bird photography in which the camera’s autofocus has a much better idea of what you’re trying to photograph.

Eland are pretty spectacular. The second-largest antelope (after the Giant Eland of West Africa). They’re recovering their numbers in South Africa after being nearly wiped out through hunting by the end of the 19th century. Gotta say, I found the operation and layout of my Fuji XE1 much more understandable from the get-go than the Nikon Z50. It’s really great for us olds who grew up on film gear that Fujifilm makes cameras that use film-camera control layouts as a starting point. Very lucky.

I also brought my little Fuji XE1. We arrived at the park pretty late and got to see the Karoo turn gold in the evening light. Course with the Fuji there’s no autofocus and no image stabilisation. So I felt I was pretty lucky to get anything close to sharp pics as these were all handheld grab shots.

Merry Xmas. Meet our new friend, El Gordo, a Bibron’s Tubercled Gecko (as far as we can work out). One chonky boi. We’ve escaped the plague in Cape Town to The Karoo National Park this year. No stops from Cape Town and the camp here is very sparsely populated for maximum social distancing. El Gordo has grown fat from the light above the braai that gives him a smorgasbord of tasty bugs. A big kudu with his corkscrew horns just wandered by the front of our place as I was pulling pics from the camera this morning. I’ve borrowed my dad’s new Nikon Z_50 and I’ll be trying to shoot some good quality footage with it over the next few days.

These ones are greater flamingoes - although their pink beaks are underwater. Almost a retro-80s, vapour-wave kinda thing going on with the colour scheme and the ripple patterns.

We haven’t worked out what these little wading birds were yet [Little Stints most likely] But damn if there weren’t a lot of them… Some kind of atmospheric disturbance made it really hard to get sharp pics of them with the long lens when they settled. Will update with ID. There were a bunch of serious birders there for a “Baird’s Sandpiper” - probably some storm-lost bird from a distant country or something. Very exciting for the people who’re into chasing down these vagrant rarities, but it’s not really our bag.

Lesser Flamingoes! I don’t think I’ve ever seen them at Strandfontein before. Plenty of the Greater Flamingoes - and we saw lots of those too. Greater Flamingoes are almost all white except for their pink beaks and wing feathers. Lesser Flamingoes like these have deep red beaks, often quite red wing-feathers, and occasionally the whole bird is a lurid pink. Manual focus on the Fujifilm XE1 with a Nikon 300mm f4 and 1.4x converter 💪 ...

Like many people I’ve been making bread since COVID started. Doing it every week has made my very simple recipe incredibly quick. And it’s evolved over time. Now I put it in the fan-oven at a high heat and get a crust much like French bread. I’m sure not everyone would like it with such a crunchy crust, but it suits me very well.