The Nest

Since Covid restrictions took control of my life, I've spent a lot of time in the garden and in recent months I've been working on taking better photos of the birds that visit me there. There aren't as big a variety as I'd like, but they give me something to do from time to time. I first wrote about them last November after taking what is to date my best photo of a bird in flight.

That bird was just visiting but we have some that set up home in our garden for a while. Among those is a strange little weaver bird which keeps constructing nests, then demolishing them and starting new ones. Here he is hard at work constructing one of his early nests in August 2021.

Initially I wondered what happened to all the nests he built. I thought the wind had blown them away, or that some other species of bird was trying to chase him away, but a friend told me that his strange behaviour is normal for the species. However it was only recently that I witnessed him demolishing his most recent nest. Unfortunately I was unable to get an uncluttered view of him in action. But I did get a couple of shots of the half-demolished nest when my presence chased him away.

This was a pretty straight forward view, which I nearly entered for DPChallenge's Wabi Sabi challenge.

In the end I decided this one was more interesting.

He finished the demolition after I went inside and seems to have no plans to build another nest on that bush.

Spotted Dikkops

I first became aware of Spotted Dikkops when a couple moved into our garden in late 2009. The female laid two eggs but only one hatched that year.

Sadly the little one didn't survive for very long.

The mother's reaction to losing her chick was very sad. I wrote this in the comments about the above photo at DPChallenge on December 30th, 2009:

I'm totally devastated. The baby is dead. When I've looked out of the window this morning I've seen the mother go up to look at him a couple of times and then she stares at me as if she is asking for help.

I keep going back to the window to look in the hope that he is just sleeping and that he'll still move, but he's been lying there for a long time now and I know that it's not going to happen.

I wish I knew what went wrong because the parents were so protective.

I did manage to immortalize the little one on video but the quality isn't very good.

Next summer they were back. This time both eggs hatched and once again I caught them on video.

Once again the little ones didn't survive for long.

They didn't visit again until late 2019. By the time I spotted them in our garden there was already one juvenile, which was bigger than the ones I'd seen in earlier years. As I watched him grow, start exercising his wings and jumping around, I was hopeful that he would survive.

He "posed" for several photos that I liked.

This photo didn't do particularly well at DPChallenge, but I really like it. I titled it "Belly Flop" because he looks as if he had fallen. In reality he was resting in the grass and decided to stretch his wing.

The following photo was taken 18 days later. By then I'd noticed that he was starting to limp, and when I went into the garden he tried to hide in a corner but I managed to get really close and got this portrait.

That was the day I became aware that something wasn't quite right. It was suggested to me that he'd broken one of his wings in an attempt to fly.

The family stuck around a little while longer, then one day they vanished.

The parents returned a week or so later, but I never saw the young one again. I don't know what became of him.

Moving forward to December 2021.

When I was in the garden a couple of weeks ago I spotted a couple behaving as if they were at home. I hoped they were planning to stay. Unfortunately they didn't, but I managed to get a few shots I liked including the one at the top of this post.

Getting it Right in Camera

The challenge was "Blue". I wasn't feeling inspired but I was determined to enter something. It was the final day of the challenge and I had nothing.

It was during a period in which Covid numbers were low, so I was able to go on with my life in something approaching a normal manner. Trouble was that though there were interesting things around, none of them were blue. But this line of grey doors looked interesting. 

Changing the colour of an image in Photoshop is easy, but for this particular challenge no editing was allowed. All changes had to be done in camera. 

No problem. All I had to do was make a couple of changes to my normal settings. First change my white balance. Then I decided this scene would work best as a square, so that required another change to my settings. 

So much easier than my usual workflow where editing takes a lot more time than getting the shot.

Unfortunately my preference for black and white images means I can't often work this way.

Creative Blur

Back in the days when I used a film camera I sent my used films to a lab to be developed. For a while I couldn't understand why some of my photos didn't come out. In my ignorance I believed that those negatives were blank.

But after a while I realised that wasn't the case. When I inspected the negatives there was definitely something there. But what? The person operating the printer was making value judgments on my behalf and only printing what he or she regarded as successful photos.

As it sometimes took me several weeks to fill a film, by the time it went to the lab I often didn't remember what was on it. I was desperate to know what had gone wrong so I started instructing the lab to print all the negatives, even the "bad" ones. That was when I discovered how often my creative experiments were rejected by someone who had no idea what I was trying to achieve. How could I learn from my mistakes if I didn't know what they were?

Thankfully with digital cameras that's no longer an issue.

I hate to think what the lab staff would have thought of this blurry photo. It was one of my most successful photos of 2021 - my first photo ever to win a virtual ribbon at DPChallenge.

The challenge was "Late". My title was "Rush". Without the blur it would have told a very different story.

It's easy to take blurry photos. Sometimes it's hard to get them right.

Too Close for Comfort

I spent a long time recently taking photos of the bees on a tree in my garden. I wasn't happy with the results.

Bees aren't easy subjects. The ones I was watching were very active, making it difficult to get properly focused shots. And I couldn't get close enough to get detailed shots. I didn't want to risk getting stung.

This shot was taken a few days earlier. A lucky shot when I was concentrating on the flowers from a safe distance. Perhaps that's a better approach for me.

I have this more detailed photo of a bee in my DPChallenge archive - a photo of a dead bee. And no, I didn't kill it.

Stop Right There

The date was April 1st 2020. South Africa had been in lockdown for four days. At that stage the lockdown was expected to last for 21 days; then it was extended for another two weeks before restrictions were eased slightly. But my own personal restrictions remained in place for a lot longer.

By nature I'm an extremely nervous person and I was particularly concerned about the safety of my elderly mother, so it was to be five months before I could pluck up the courage to go anywhere. In all that time I hadn't even been close to a supermarket, opting to order all our groceries online. But five months later it was a decision I'd come to regret. Returning to a new reality was hard.

But back in April 2020 a three week break from normal life didn't seem that serious.

This was another challenge photo. The challenge was "Exiled in Pandemia". My title was "Stop Right There".

Fake Smile

 Although I love taking photos, I don't feel comfortable in front of a camera and will avoid having my photo taken unless I really have to. However, when a photography site called DPChallenge (of which I'm a long time member) held a challenge titled "Goofy Face" in December 2020, I decided to shoot a few self-portraits wearing my favourite mask and a hat. My chosen photo for that challenge is now my profile photo on Facebook and WhatsApp.

When I first made it my profile photo on WhatsApp, a horrified friend phoned to ask if I'd seen it. For some reason it didn't dawn on him that I actually liked that photo and wanted other people to see it. But as long I like it, it doesn't really matter what he thinks.

In August 2021 DPChallenge had a challenge called "The Smile". Most challenges require photos taken during the two week period that the challenge runs, but since the pandemic started they run one challenge per week for any photo one has ever taken on a digital camera, so I decided to use one of the outtakes from the "Goofy Face" challenge.

I didn't want to enter something too similar to the one from the earlier challenge, so I made myself a lot more anonymous in this one. I like the fact that it's not about me, only the mask.