Xtrans1

My boy is apparently now completely unfazed by the vacuum cleaner. Trinket, on the other hand, has once again gone into deep hiding. She still thinks it’s Stalingrad.

This guy asked me to take his pic when he saw me with my camera this morning near the Observatory station. He’s a local and I used to know his name, but was all thinking about camera stuff and forgot to ask. So there’s a weird thing with digital cameras: people are usually satisfied just to see themselves on the back of the camera. Now I’ve got a bit of a scheme. I want to get one of those Instax printers so I can make a print on the spot from the camera. Unfortunately it won’t be this one. The XE1 came out in 2013 and doesn’t have any wireless connectivity. But it’s something I plan to put together in the future because so many people don’t have any pictures of themselves - for memories or to pass on to loved ones. Pics on phones often end up disappearing with those phones. And few people ever have their picture taken by anyone who’s learned much photographic technique. So I’d really like to be able to make a small but high quality print when I take a picture of a someone I’m not in digital contact with. The instax printer uses a photographic printing technique so the quality is a lot better than that of other portable printers - but the prints are about $1 each. So I’d still have to be sparing.

@withoutaleaf and I had breakfast @rust.coffee.bar this morning. It sure is nice to be able to do some quasi-normal things during this lull in the pandemic now that we’re fully-vaxxed. I even got to be in a room with my whole band - six people in total - on Monday evening for two hours. It felt very good indeed after nearly 20 months.

If you’re ok to completely abandon any hope of ever owning your own home, the smashed avocado on sourdough toast @rust.coffee.bar here in Observatory is really damn good. That’s a joke, of course - based on some inequality-justifying hack’s ludicrous argument for why millennials don’t own homes. But not joking about the yumminess of this toast.

More experiments with retro wildlife photography. These are plains zebras - the more common of the two species of zebra in South Africa. This one is widespread throughout the continent South of the Sahara. There is one more species that is deeply endangered that survives only in small, protected enclaves in Kenya and Sudan.

The Cape Buffalo - or African Buffalo. It has a far more violent reputation than most of its Asian cousins - especially the Water Buffalo which has been widely domesticated and provides mozzarella for your pizza. This buffalo has never been domesticated. It’s simply too strong and fierce. Of course they start off pretty cute.

Looking at some of my ‘B’ selections from our recent Kruger Park trip. This was more experimentation with my ultra cheap ttartisan 50mm f1.2 on my Fujifilm XE1 - shooting wide open to get a mid 20th C bushveld look. You can see the vintage lens design in this brand new lens in the slightly odd character of the out-of-focus parts of the image.

A day yesterday with long tall Jay. His kids were very kind and let us watch our Velvet Underground documentary as long as we were quiet. After my comical series of mishaps, I finally made it out to Noordhoek only by [smartphone taxi-service] but it was well worth it. The leafy hide of the peninsula is on display out there. And the spring clouds were fierce and judgemental.

A #latergram of an Indian takeaway feast in the Jozi home of our dear friends @sophdex and @ezlemoen with parents, Jill and Pierre, and collies, airedales, and cats. Johannesburg doesn’t look nearly as welcoming in spring compared to summer. But get indoors and the citizens (not just our friends) are as friendly as ever. Shooting scenes like this in available darkness is a big part of what makes having a fast wide-angle lens such a pleasure.

Pity about the shadows. But a very rare picture of these two eccentric gents in the wild: Gareth and Marcus (with beard!). I’ve quoted Hunter Thompson with regard to Gareth before, but it goes for both of them: “Too strange to live. Too rare to die.