Photography and Writing
From photographs of birds, taken during my recent field trip to the Marievale Bird Sanctuary, this blog will see a change of scene, to our travels in Spain – but only when we are back, Rob and I, towards the end of September, from Andalucia and Madrid. Meanwhile here is one image – a blacksmith […]
This Pied Kingfisher was hard at work when I came across him, rising from a bed of reeds, hovering, swivelling his head this way and that, wings beating madly as he looked for his dinner. I took a million photographs, the first lot using a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion, and then a […]
These little chicks are coot, you might say. I saw them, on the vlei at Marievale, far out on the water, at the furthest reach of my 500mm telephoto, and even then I had to crop the images severely. The teeniest chicks, interestingly, were the furthest out – mere orange-beaked fluff, beside the black hulls […]
Here’s a good one. A prisoner in a Turkish prison goes to the prison library, and asks for a particular book. The prison librarian replies, ‘We don’t have that book. But we do have the author.’ Signs of the times, you might say – the modern dystopia. History has not ended – in fact, it’s […]
From the corner of the hide, you looked out across the water, directly into the light, where the coots were squabbling and giving chase, and I knew at once that this was an image made for black-and-white. I took several photographs, aware of how tricky the light was, and struggling with the heavy lens to […]
Now here’s a thing. Going through my photos from Marievale, I came across a nice sequence of images of a squacco heron marching through the reeds. You can almost hear the martial music – tum ti tum ti tum ti DUM – as it crashes onwards and finally, clumsily, launches into the air. I was […]
This little fellow, I think, has the confidence to speak for himself. Photographed from a hide at Marievale, with the Nikon D500 and Nikon 200 – 500 mm lens. The more I shoot with it, the more I love this combo!
On my left, as I drove slowly onto the causeway that crosses the marsh, was an expanse of dry reeds. Amongst the reeds, away in the distance, was an African Sacred Ibis, going about its business. Some of you may not see the point of this photograph – it’s not the conventional “portrait,” nor does […]
Once again, I had to call upon the distributed knowledge that resides in the heads of the many birders and photographers who are part of the SA Birdlife FaceBook page for help with identifying this Squacco Heron, spotted in the reeds beside the road at the Marievale Bird Sanctuary this Easter Friday. Hopefully, in time, […]