Nikon

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.

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.

#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.

Ok. It’s actually Thursday for the official #tbt. I don’t think I’ve ever shown anyone this version of this pic at Boudhanath in Nepal. Pretty sure this was on Velvia 50. This was back in 2005. . .

An old dlsr like the Nikon D200 makes you work harder - a bit like shooting film. You don’t want to go above ISO400 to avoid noise. But it still has big advantages over a phone camera if used right.

A very old friend came by today. This Nikon D200 is from the first generation of digital cameras that could produce results as good as film. It has no video. It’s low light capabilities are unremarkable. But in decent light it can make images that look great even blown up to 11”x14”. Slow but not obsolete - just like me.

The lens that I was using yesterday was really the lens that Nikon’s reputation was built on. This 105mm f2.5 from the 1960s was sharp, contrasty, and cheap compared to anything put out by Leica. It’s still a beautiful portrait lens that flattens perspective and delivers a delicious, powdery soft background. It’s light as a feather and even cheaper now. #nikon #nikkor #lens #lenses #105mm #f2.