The Cape Buffalo - or African Buffalo. It has a far more violent reputation than most of its Asian cousins - especially the Water Buffalo which has been widely domesticated and provides mozzarella for your pizza. This buffalo has never been domesticated. It’s simply too strong and fierce. Of course they start off pretty cute.
Looking at some of my ‘B’ selections from our recent Kruger Park trip. This was more experimentation with my ultra cheap ttartisan 50mm f1.2 on my Fujifilm XE1 - shooting wide open to get a mid 20th C bushveld look. You can see the vintage lens design in this brand new lens in the slightly odd character of the out-of-focus parts of the image.
A day yesterday with long tall Jay. His kids were very kind and let us watch our Velvet Underground documentary as long as we were quiet. After my comical series of mishaps, I finally made it out to Noordhoek only by [smartphone taxi-service] but it was well worth it. The leafy hide of the peninsula is on display out there. And the spring clouds were fierce and judgemental.
A #latergram of an Indian takeaway feast in the Jozi home of our dear friends @sophdex and @ezlemoen with parents, Jill and Pierre, and collies, airedales, and cats. Johannesburg doesn’t look nearly as welcoming in spring compared to summer. But get indoors and the citizens (not just our friends) are as friendly as ever. Shooting scenes like this in available darkness is a big part of what makes having a fast wide-angle lens such a pleasure.
Pity about the shadows. But a very rare picture of these two eccentric gents in the wild: Gareth and Marcus (with beard!). I’ve quoted Hunter Thompson with regard to Gareth before, but it goes for both of them: “Too strange to live. Too rare to die.
I took many hundreds of pictures of Skitten since 2007. But this was the very last one. When we first got it home from Maatjiesfontein, I was convinced that we didn’t need a third cat. I took the cutest pictures I could of it parading about to make into a collage to advertise it… and in so doing it tricked me into falling in love with it. It liked to sit on windowsills and contemplate the world going by. A most philosophical animal.
My old man. He’s a lot less stern than he sometimes appears. I got to see the Prof of cardiology ask him some niche questions about ECGs today - still a valuable font of knowledge on his lifelong arcane speciality many years after retirement.
@withoutaleaf queueing for one of her many, many, COVID tests outside a studio in town. I’ve managed to avoid them altogether (by not having any need to interact in person and not having any major symptom scares) while she’s had dozens and dozens from having to work safely on set. There’s very little pandemic on my Instagram in general. I was mostly at home and then tended to point a lens at things that were a break from the pandemic. There’ll be no shortage of documentation of this strange, history-bending time. But it is good to have a few images that show the thing actually happening in your own life even if you don’t interact with it directly - as I’ve been very lucky not to have to do.
Impala Lilies are blooming in The Kruger National Park in spring.
I don’t think this works great as an Insta pic, but it’s the kind of photo I’ll enjoy having hanging somewhere to remind me of this place when I’m not here. And bushbuck. Because I love bushbuck.