Southafricansummer

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.

Eland are pretty spectacular. The second-largest antelope (after the Giant Eland of West Africa). They’re recovering their numbers in South Africa after being nearly wiped out through hunting by the end of the 19th century. Gotta say, I found the operation and layout of my Fuji XE1 much more understandable from the get-go than the Nikon Z50. It’s really great for us olds who grew up on film gear that Fujifilm makes cameras that use film-camera control layouts as a starting point. Very lucky.

I also brought my little Fuji XE1. We arrived at the park pretty late and got to see the Karoo turn gold in the evening light. Course with the Fuji there’s no autofocus and no image stabilisation. So I felt I was pretty lucky to get anything close to sharp pics as these were all handheld grab shots.

Young lions being sweet. This is a bit unusual to see. 90% of the time lions do nothing at all. 8% of the time they’re terrifying murder-machines that set our ancient alert system on defcon GTFO. All their other behaviour fits in that last bit. If this seems a weird environment for a wild lion outside India, this is what the bushveld looks like after heavy rains. Kruger is mostly described as, “savannah woodland,” with plenty of large trees. This was in December 2013. ...