Nikond200

I found this pic I took of @withoutaleaf in 2008. I have no memory of taking it and hadn’t seen these pics since. Sometimes digital files disappear. And then sometimes they crop up as if out of nowhere.

This is a lost photo. The only version I had was one on Flickr with a long edge of 768 pixels. I’m trying AI up scaling and the results are better on images that are sharper and less underexposed than this was. It’s my dear friends @sadshirtshop when they were in a band called Fezray (Fez and beret, right?). Anyway, I liked this pic and the AI has definitely improved over the mess-of-visible-pixels alternatives from years past.

Since I got the colour more or less right, I thought I’d share more pics of those busy Kgalagadi foxes from 2008.

Foxes! Playing around in lightroom. The Kgalagadi sand completely defeated the auto white balance when I took this pic back in 2008. Finally managed to get a version I can live with. These Cape Foxes had a den by the road and the young ones were having great games before bedtime first thing in the morning.

Apparently I took this almost exactly ten years ago. August 7, 2010. A slightly gloomy winter’s day down at the good ol’ sewrage-works with my dad, @millar6300, relieved by the firework-brightness of these Greater Flamingos.

#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.

Guerrilla DSLR photography. I’m going to photograph the birds that land on the phone line behind our house using this 10 year old Nikon D200 and this 40 odd year old Pentax / Takumar 400mm lens that’s been butchered to fit. Watch this space.

All cats all the time I’m afraid. I should start taking more interesting pics again as Feb goes on. My handsome boy is in danger of getting fat. He eats twice as much as the others. This is that same 105mm Nikkor from the ‘70s that I posted last year. It’s my fave 35mm lens at the moment. On this crop sensor it’s a 158mm f2.5 - a perfect portrait lens.

Still remembering how to use a ten year old dslr. The screen isn’t high res enough to judge focus even roughly. So, again, it’s a bit like shooting film. You’ve got to be pretty sure when you press the shutter. Another thing that hasn’t changed in ten years is that Skitten still loves a box.

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.