Southafrica

Dawn impala. I’m trying some new camera settings and they take a bit of getting used to. Quite a bit of noise on this one. Correctible with care. But I didn’t need a very high shutter-speed for this kind of thing.

Dawn in the African bushveld style.

Oh hai! Guess where we are again.

Looking through some pics to make some prints and I discovered this lion pic from 2018. They really are strange-looking cats. Very long and lean. I guess they’re built for more endurance than Tigers and most other cats that are ambush hunters. Lions have to keep up with prey for longer periods of time, I think.

An aspirational piece of preindustrial #cottagecore, West Coast style. Now an information centre describing people’s comings and going’s over the last 100,000 plus years (lol at Europe “having so much history”).

Balcony Birds No. 5. I used to be confused about what this was. It’s not a turtle dove. It’s a red-eyed dove - cunningly named after a feature that’s really difficult to spot with the naked eye. The easier way to tell is that they’re much larger than the Cape Turtle Dove, which is really quite a little thing. The Red-Eyed Dove is almost pigeon sized. It also has a pinky shade to its head and breast while the turtle dove is… dove-grey. They really are lovely, gentle things. Even if they’re not exactly geniuses.

This struck me as the most South African weekend scene I can imagine - from the end of World War II to today, kids hanging out getting treats on the weekend.

Sometimes we have to venture into weird little SA village pubs and meet the locals so you don’t have to. Throwback to a few years back on a winter night in Nieu Bethesda. Apart from the TV there’s not much to tell you it was taken after 1955.

Observatory. It’s the mixture of Victorian cake-like prettiness with a layer of middle-income country grime.

School kids walking past parliament and a statue of the first prime minister of The Union Of South Africa. Maybe they’ll get to live in a country that’s not exploited by tyrants or thieves.