Fujifilm

Trinket overcome by a truly savage yawn. She at least gets to go out visiting the neighbours by her wall-top pathways.

Balcony Birds No. 6. This one was exciting. We’re almost positive this is a juvenile Rufous-Breasted Sparrowhawk. It makes sense that it would be coming around here trying to murder our sparrows. These kinds of hawks are built for manoeuvrability - they can zip between the branches at speed to surprise perching birds. Aparna spotted this through the window and I was lucky enough to grab some hand-held, unstabilised pics - and got a few decently sharp ones. Lightroom could only partially compensate for the heavy purple fringing due to the older teleconverter dealing with the intense contrast against the sky. ...

A spiky plant that I know not.

Roaming about, photographing small things.

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

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.

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 💪 ...