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.

My Third Eye

 

I never go anywhere without a camera. I don't always use it, but it's always there just in case I see something which takes my fancy. 

Sadly, since the start of the pandemic, most of my photos have been taken in my garden. I hope that will change in 2022 and that I'll be able to take "my third eye" to some interesting places.

Until then I've got thousands to old photos to share.

When Photography Feels Like Cheating

 In the good old days BC (before Covid) I was always rushing around and very rarely spent time in my own garden. Lockdown changed that. Although there's not much of interest there, I spent a lot of time in the garden taking photos of the same boring things. Then a few months ago I developed an interest in bird photography. 

The purchase of a Canon M6 Mark II made it much easier to capture birds in flight and allowed me to catch what would previously have been "the one that got away" - photos that my slow reflexes would never have been able to catch without the assistance of pre-burst shooting.

Pre-burst shooting is when you half press the shutter button to focus on your chosen subject and wait until the decisive moment to fully press it. As long as the shutter is half pressed, a special feature on cameras like the M6 Mark II allows the camera to temporarily save 30 seconds worth of shots in the buffer, and a full press will tell the camera to save the last 30 seconds worth of those shots to the memory card. 

I confess in the beginning it felt like cheating. But I soon realised that it still takes effort on my part to get those shots. Effort and a lot of patience.

Here is one of my favourites.

So Bad It's Good

I've belonged to a site called DPChallenge for almost as long as I've owned a digital camera and I've learned a lot from their forums and from participating in their challenges.

One of their recent challenges was to take a photo "So Bad It's Good".

It was a struggle, but in the end I came up with something I was quite happy with. Sadly for this particular challenge no editing was allowed, but I've since produced a couple of black and white versions which I quite like. This one was created using Photoshop on my computer:

I love Photoshop and some of the plug-ins I have at my disposal, but strangely I prefer this version created on my phone using Photoshop Express:

The Meeting

I love the way my fisheye lens manages to squeeze so much into the frame. This was a quick shot I grabbed as I was walking into the room where a bonsai meeting I attended this weekend was being held.

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Linking up with The Weekend in Black and White and Black and White View.

Red Car

While I've been experimenting with editing some of my old photos I discovered a very simple way to do selective desaturation. It doesn't look good for every photo, but I kind of like how this one worked out.

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Linking up to Photo Friday.

Birds on a Street Light

One of the birds commonly seen in my city is the Hadeda, a member of the Ibis family. He's a large bird, and rather noisy, but I've learned to appreciate his presence because his diet includes a nasty creature commonly referred to as a Parktown Prawn - one of the few bugs that really frightens me.

In the past I've taken a few photos of these birds walking around on the ground, but recently I've become aware of their liking for perching on street lights, and I've been longing to get a photo of them up there.

Today the opportunity finally presented itself to me.

Once again, I've opted for a dark black and white edit.

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Linking up with Wordless Wednesdays and Wild Bird Wednesday.

Another Moth

I finally finished the job of moving my bonsai blog to its new domain last night, but in the process I've been neglecting this one. Although I suffer terribly from writer's block, I'd be lying if I said that the problem was entirely a lack of inspiration. I can be terribly lazy too.

But even when I'm struggling for ideas, old photos are in plentiful supply, so I figured I might as well share another moth. This one wasn't quite as spectacular as the Big Brown Moth that I shared back in May, and if memory serves me correctly it was a lot smaller, but I like the way this photo came out too.

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Linking up to Monday Macro 2, Black and White View and Nature Notes.

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.

Fantasy Island

Many of the photos I've edited for this blog so far have created illusions while still bearing some resemblance to reality. Today I went for something totally different.

The "island" in this image is actually part of a leaf.

Looking for Inspiration

It was never part of my plans to spend a large chunk of the day watching YouTube videos, but after stumbling across one entitled How Do I Develop My Own Style? I just got carried away as the suggestions for interesting photography videos were all so interesting.

Finally I got dragged into some really quirky stuff involving double exposures and prism use to create some really interesting effects in camera.

It was at that stage that I was reminded of this photo I took way back in 2014.

Despite appearances to the contrary, the only editing I did on this photo was a quick black and white conversion. And no, it wasn't a double exposure! I actually used a multi-image filter screwed into the front of my lens.

It's been a while since I've done anything like this, but perhaps all those videos have been the wake-up call I needed to push myself a bit harder in creating some really wacky photos.

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Linking up to Wordless Wednesday.

Grasshopper Noir

I've been procrastinating horribly with moving the last of my bonsai posts to their new domain, but over the last couple of days I've decided to get the work finished once and for all so that I can turn my attention to working on my trees and writing new posts.

What's been slowing me down is the need to change the watermarks on my photos. While working on that a little while ago, I decided to experiment with the photo I used in a post titled A Visitor to the Bonsai Garden.

The post is about a beautiful grasshopper that I discovered on one of my trees a few months ago. He was quite the most colourful grasshopper I've ever seen, and yet when I opened that photo today I couldn't help wondering what it would look like in Noir.

I really liked the result, but I felt it was a little too quirky for that blog. If you'd like to see what he looks like in colour, you can see him there. There's a video too!

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Linking up with Nature Notes, Black and White View and The Weekend in Black and White.

A New Direction

When I started this blog my intention was to share a photo every day.

As I can sometimes go days at a time without taking any photos, this meant that I would often need to go digging into my archives for interesting shots, then editing them to look their best here. Some days it was fun, others it just felt like hard work. Committing to doing something every day regardless of whether I could spare the time or not was clearly a mistake.

At the same time I sometimes feel that I want to write about things that aren't related to my photos. As I already have a second blog focusing on my bonsai trees, I didn't want to commit to any more.

For a while I toyed with the idea of giving up on this blog and starting a new one from scratch, but I felt that doing so would be wasting the time and effort I'd already put into this one. I actually quite like some of my posts though there are a few that I may delete in time.

This post marks a new direction for my blog, and with it a new name. I'll try to keep it quirky :)

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Linking up with The Ultimate Rabbit Hole and The Weekend in Black and White.

The Ceiling

I've been having fun playing with my fish-eye converter this week. I love the way it turns this ceiling into something almost abstract.