Looking at – and seeing – the world
August 3, 2020 2 Comments
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Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 800 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Muted profile; south Bristol; 25 July 2020.
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July 26, 2020 Leave a comment
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Telegraph pole, gull and wild weather, just as the sun was rising.
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – highly recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 200 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid profile; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at Janice’s Infrared preset and adding a tone; south Bristol; 21 July 2020.
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July 24, 2020 4 Comments
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Marabou Storks and cormorants silhouetted in the sunrise at Lake Nakuru, Kenya; Jan 1978.
Lake Nakuru is a soda lake located over a mile above sea level in the floor of Kenya’s rift valley. It is most famous for the vast flocks of flamingos – flocks that can be over a million strong – that periodically reside on the alkaline waters.
Here are two other resident members of the lake’s teeming birdlife. The Marabou is a huge stork – five feet from beak to tail – and a very successful scavenger of anything at all eatable, and also an opportunistic killer of anything small and defenceless. It frequently attends kills of large mammals alongside vultures, and has a similarly unfeathered head for retrieving entrails etc from deep inside carcasses.
The cormorants are the same bird that we have here in Britain: they exist on a diet of fish which they catch underwater. Despite the fact that they are predominantly waterbirds, their feathers are not waterproofed like those of ducks so that they must be dried out after underwater sorties – and the bird top right is doing just that – standing in the warming sun, with wings out to dry. (The bird bottom right appears to have a beak protruding from the back of its head, but this is in fact the beak of another individual, swimming on the water behind it.)
This shot might very well have been presented in monochrome, but the gold of the sunrise is not to be abandoned!
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: 400mm telephoto on Olympus OM SLR, mounted on a tripod; Agfa CT18 colour slide film, rated at 64 ISO.
THE ARCHIVE KENYA SERIES
I’m re-posting photographs that I took in Kenya over 30 years ago. You can find more context here . Click onto the “Archive Kenya” tag (below) to see more of these film images from Kenya.
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July 19, 2020 16 Comments
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Mt Kenya, seen from the gate of Mt Kenya National Park; August 1978.
The dark highland forest surrounding the mountain has mist clouds. Above this forest is a great mass of slightly paler, hummocky country known as the Vertical Bog, a steep and muddy section. Further up again, are bare rock, ice and snow.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: OM-1 with 75-150 Zuiko lens; Agfa CT18 colour slide film rated at 64 ISO; converted into mono with Alien Skin’s Exposure 2.
THE ARCHIVE KENYA SERIES
I’m re-posting photographs that I took in Kenya over 30 years ago. You can find more context here . Click onto the “Archive Kenya” tag (below) to see more of these film images from Kenya.
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July 19, 2020 15 Comments
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My long, early morning walks in Bristol’s outer suburbs are considerably added to by the wildlife I encounter. There are birds of course and, as an ex-birder (1967-2002), I enjoy seeing them all, even the commonest species, and there are always birds to see. But mammals are rather less numerous – although I had a close encounter with a Hedgehog this morning. Bristol is well known for its urban foxes, they’re seen more or less daily, and especially so on the days that households’ food waste is collected. And Grey Squirrels (originally from the USA) are always around, and indeed a pair lives around the large Hazel tree in our back garden.
Deer are also seen. Muntjacs (from the Far East) are often in our garden (sometimes with their fawns >>> and a pregnant female seen today promises more of those) and the native Roe, a larger deer, occasionally comes in too, which is a thrill. But my early walks pass an open field (recently proposed as part of the route for a new main road!) where Roe are quite often seen – and there have been a spate of sightings here over the past fortnight. I never carry any of the bigger cameras on these walks, just the little Olympus TOUGH TG-5, but its limited telephoto (100mm equivalent) is rarely of any use for wildlife.
However, yesterday, three Roes were near the field’s edge and, creeping up behind a hedge, I was able to capture this image. I’m a complete anarchist when it comes to cropping images, and this represents only about 10% of the TG-5’s minute frame. but here it is anyway. I had the TG-5 down at 400 ISO for greater quality – and I think this a tribute to this camera’s abilities. Yes, the Nikon Z 6 would have done much better, but then the Z 6 doesn’t fit in my trouser pocket and, furthermore, it is very considerably less robust.
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – highly recommended!
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 400 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Adobe Standard profile; south Bristol; 11 July 2020.
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July 17, 2020 10 Comments
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Sunset over Amboseli Game Reserve, Kenya; July 1978.
With something definitely more striking than natural in mind, I’ve scanned this 34 (now 42!) year old slide into digital and then taken it into SEP2 as a .tiff . Contrast and structure have been raised, grain added, and then some of the sunset’s wonderful colours restored. The top of the dark cloud, directly above the sun, shows a nice luminous edge.
The trees are Yellow-barked Acacias or “Fever Trees”, that grow around the lakes in Amboseli’s otherwise very dry (and extremely dusty!) environment.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window: recommended.
Technique: OM-1 with 75-150 Zuiko lens at 150mm; Agfa CT18 colour slide film, rated at 64 ISO; converted to mono, and selectively re-coloured, in Silver Efex Pro 2.
THE ARCHIVE KENYA SERIES
I’m re-posting photographs that I took in Kenya over 30 years ago. You can find more context here . Click onto the “Archive Kenya” tag (below) to see more of these film images from Kenya.
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July 15, 2020 9 Comments
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Dusk at the Sand River Gate, Maasai Mara Game Reserve; April 1979.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: OM-1 with 28mm Zuiko lens; Agfa CT18 colour slide film, rated at 64 ISO.
THE ARCHIVE KENYA SERIES
I’m re-posting photographs that I took in Kenya over 30 years ago. You can find more context here . Click onto the “Archive Kenya” tag (below) to see more of these film images from Kenya.
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July 14, 2020 2 Comments
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Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 800 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Portrait profile; south Bristol; 10 July 2020.
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July 12, 2020 2 Comments
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Mallard ducks on the edge of Chew Valley Lake, Somerset; 6 Apr 2015.
A pair of these common and often very tame ducks, at Herons Green.
On the left, the male stands immobile on one leg. On the right, his mate’s busy preening sends great numbers of ripples out into the shallows.
Click onto the image to see a larger version in a separate window – highly recommended.
Technique: D700 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 200mm; 200 ISO; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Low Key 2 preset.
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July 8, 2020 8 Comments
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Looking through a parked car’s dew-soaked windscreen towards the rectangular silhouette of the rear view mirror; the rising sun provides backlighting and purple lens flare.
There are earlier images in this Parked Car series here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 . Each will open in a separate window.
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 250 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Modern 07 profile; south Bristol; 22 Apr 2020.
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