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.

Weeds in Black and White

Lately I find that I can't stay away from black and white when editing my photos.

This was a photo of some weeds I shot a while back. The flowers were actually yellow, but they stand out against the background so much better this way.

If you click on the photo to see a larger version you may be able to see that the flower on the left was covered with ants.

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Linking up with Floral Friday Fotos and Saturday Show Off.

Proteas

 I've gone a bit weird with my editing today. Who would have thought it was possible to make proteas look sinister? Yet I think that's what's happened here.

I'm sure that these won't be to everyone's liking but I've often found my photos drifting towards the dark side.

I've been considering doing a project called SoFoBoMo for a while now, but I was a bit baffled as to what theme I should use. The more time I spend editing photos, the more I feel that I should make my theme "Noir" - French for black, possibly focusing on mundane objects.

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Linking up to The Weekend in Black and White.

Chilli Flower

I'm still hard at work moving my bonsai blog to it's new domain and, while working with the photos I need for it, I came across this shot of a chilli flower which I used in a post I first published in early January this year.

I was very excited by this little flower, which was the first one on a seedling that I'd acquired a few months before. It was really tiny - about the size of my thumbnail, and I found it quite difficult to get a decent photo.

When I'd done editing it for my bonsai blog, I spent a little time playing with it in Photoshop and created a couple of semi-abstract flower shots.

This first one isn't too different from the reality, but the second one is much more abstract, though still recognisable as a flower.

By contrast to these, a lot of the images I create from my photos bear no resemblance to the photos I started out with.

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Linking up with Saturday Show Off and Macro Monday 2.

Digital Flowers

Sometimes I think that digital art is more my forte than photography.

When I came across the artificial flowers featured here, the sign in front of them immediately grabbed my attention, so out came my camera. Perhaps it was the poor nature of the lighting, but after my initial attempts at editing, I wasn't too happy with the result.

So I decided to see what else I could do with the picture. After a little experimentation I liked this one a lot better than the original photo.

Suddenly, while writing this post, I realised what I was doing wrong with the original, so it was back to Photoshop, where I finally got a result that I like.

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Linking up with Randomosity.

Orchids

I'm not a big fan of artificial flowers and am rarely tempted to take photos when I see them. In this case, however, the interplay of shadows and reflections made them hard to resist.

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Linking up to Floral Friday Fotos, Photo Friday, Today's Flowers, Weekend Reflections and Shadow Shot Sunday.

Cam O'Flage

I don't often take photos of flowers growing in nature. Usually my flower photos show flowers growing on potted plants. More often than not they're growing on my bonsai trees. However there are occasions when I need something a bit different and in May 2011 I needed to find a more natural view in a hurry.

I didn't have to look far as the daisy bush in my garden was covered with flowers. It's not a beautiful plant though and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get anything interesting, but I had to try.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered this little guy hiding in one of the flowers.

He moved around quite a bit during this shoot, but was cooperative enough to let me get several shots I liked.

I'm still not sure which one I like best.

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Linking up to Monday Mellow Yellows, Macro Monday and Through My Lens.

Red Flower, Yellow Flower

Even though photography has been one of my hobbies for more than half my life, I'm still struggling to develop my own photographic style.

One thing I particularly enjoy, however, is showing the world in a way that the human eye doesn't normally get to see it. One way of doing this is to get up close and personal to tiny things like I did in my post about "The Fly".

Another way is by choosing lenses which show a distorted picture of the world.

I don't have a fisheye lens, but I do have a fisheye adaptor which screws into the front of my lens and allows me to get up close to little things, making them appear large in the photo, while making background items appear tiny. That's how I managed to make these flowers appear larger than the trees in the background.

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This post is part of Monday Morning Yellows, Today's Flowers, Macro Monday and FloralFridayFoto.