Nikonz50

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.