Posts Tagged Animals
Kruger
So we went down to South Africa.
What better way to start off my first African vacation than a safari drive in Kruger National Park? After receiving a recommendation about Wildlife Safaris (the link here would suggest I recommend them as well), we booked a four day tour. When picked up in the minivan, we were happy to find out that there are no other tourists with us. Thus three have set off from Johannesburg to the park: Efrat, Clive (the amazing guide) and myself.
The thing about driving around in the park is that you can spend hours looking in all directions and not see a thing (an interesting thing that is; an animal; preferably one of the Big Five). So it was a nice treat to see three male lions not more than 15 minutes after entering the park.
We’ve seen four out of the Big Five: lions, elephants, buffaloes and rhinos. We didn’t see leopards, even though I would have settled for one. You might wonder (as did I) why aren’t the giraffes or hippos, being bigger than some of the above, aren’t included in the Big Five. It’s because the list is made up of the most dangerous animals to hunt. And nobody wants to hunt a hippo. Or is scared of a giraffe.
Oh, I wouldn’t bother you with a photo of the waterhole where the Battle of Kruger occurred. It has lions, buffaloes, crocodiles and more almost 52 million views, but when we got there, the place was quite empty. So I’ll finish with a Wilderbeest followed by a Woodland Kingfisher (and just assume you recognized the lion and buffaloes above):
Looking the bug square in the eye
I was at my cousin’s wedding Thursday night. It was great. Music, friends & family, good food and so on. We left the place slightly after 1am and got held up at a police inspection to see who’s been drinking too much. That took forever. And to top that, the highway was blocked for maintenance. But I did manage to get home. Eventually that is. I awoke after a brief 3.5 hour sleep to reach Rishon Letzion’s lake park at 6:30 am.
At first sight, the area looked like god knows what. A lake(ish looking pond) adjecent to an amusement park with some light vegetation around. Nothing fancy. It looked like it’s gonna be a wasted morning. And then Allon Kira showed us all the things which were to small to see:
When you find yourself crouching and crawling around, you suddenly realise how much life is around you. Dragonflies, normal flies, and many other creatures which I could name if I’d listened in biology class. Looking through the lens suddenly shows you things you didn’t notice before. Even more when you view the pictures on the computer later on. Especially if you have some dirt on your lens. That shows up very nicely on the computer…
I had a yet another wonderful experience. Now I need to buy me a set of Kenko extension tubes for macro photography of my own. I’ll just finish off with voyeurism on the macro level:
Happy photographing!
Composition Rules
It has come to my attention that every beginning photographer has to learn some very basic rules:
- The Rule of Thirds explaining that a picture should be divided into 3 by horizontal and/or vertical lines.
- The Golden Ratio referring to a ratio used since the days of Leonardo De Vinci and is said to be found everywhere in nature.
- The Rule of Diagonals about having long diagonals across your photos.
- And probably many more…
Some rules are meant to be broken.
And now for something completly different: a hoopoe playing with it’s food…
36 Photos
Continuing with my photography course, we’ve set out to Florentine neighbourhood in southern Tel-Aviv last Friday. This outing was with Gilad Benari, and was titled “A different angle on photography”. Our goal was to find that thing in photos which will make us stand out, or to be precise: to be unique. The exercise had two very strict and intimidating limitations: use a fixed lens (50mm) and no more than 36 photos.
36 photos in 2 hours? You gotta be kidding me. I’ve just started getting used to 200 photos in less than an hour. And on top of that, no wide angle or tele? Crap… Uh… Okay, let’s see what we’ve got:
Not bad (if I my say so myself regarding a photo of mine 
). These limitations made me think so much before releasing the shutter. Composition. Making sure I’ve got the camera on the correct parameters. And also planning ahead, like in this next photo, where I just stood there, looking through the viewfinder, waiting for someone to walk by:
At the end of the two hours, I realised I took 17 photos. It looked like I took this to the other extreme… This allowed me to take 5 photos of this urban leopard:
I got used to taking many photos. In order to post some, I’d go over them, delete the bad ones, then the not so good ones, then the expendables, then the slightly less better than the others and so on. Leaving the chosen few (or to be more precise: the undeleted few). Now I could choose the pictures I wanted rather than the ones I don’t. I’ve really enjoyed this exercise and would highly recommend it too all of you who are used to just take as many photos as possible.
I also recommend Gilad’s project: A Different Look At Israel. A unique look it is…