Roos in Silhouette

My wife, cousins and I were walking along one of the hiking tracks down on the tip of the Mornington Peninsula.  Earlier Bruce had said he’d love to see Kangaroos in their native environment and we’d all but stumbled into an entire mob of them; they were almost tame – certainly used to seeing people – which allowed us to get quite close and observe them.  The setting was magic, a beautiful sea cliff path bustling with wildlife which, apart from the large black snake we almost stepped on, provided a perfect time out from the rat-race in general.

On the way back to the car we climbed a hill to walk along the top of the bluff and stumbled upon about 40 of them.  We must have, in true city dwelling Homo sapiens style, made one almighty racket stomping through the bush and they took flight.  My camera was in my bag so I just managed to snap the last of them in silhouette before they disappeared from view.  A strong sepia tone enhanced the contrast between the sky and the land and made for a more engaging photo.

Any camera will do

These days I rarely go anywhere without my SLR which means lugging a bag with a heavy camera, lenses and very often a tripod across rugged terrain and into places where you’d rather have your hands free to hold on to stuff.  Most of us get into the mindset that when the light is right you want the best possible bit of kit to capture the magic and on the whole that is a noble, albeit weighty and ofttimes cumbersome aspiration.

I was flicking through some of the photos of my 2006 safari to the Kruger Park when, for one reason and another, all I had with me was this:

It was one of the first digital cameras on the market and suffers from all the lovely shutter lag that marred that generation of cameras; press the shutter release and hope and pray that your subject doesn’t get bored and meander out of the scene. 

In today’s age of mega-pixel madness where ‘more is better’ (except if you know better) you may wonder how useful 2.1 mega-pixels actually was but let me say that even now this camera takes some pretty solid photos and offers the wonderful wide-angle magic of most compact cameras.

I was not in any way displeased at how this little machine performed on a difficult backlit silhouette of my all time favourite tree in the world; the African Baobab.

 

Title	Baobab Sunset
Taken on	14 August 2006
	Kruger Park, South Africa
EXIF	f/8.7 ISO100, Fujifilm Finepix 2400Z

Updated my Twitter with an African Sunset

I finally got round to updating the pale blue default on my Twitter home page. For the background graphics I chose a sunset silhouette taken on my last trip to the Kruger National Park in South Africa. I have two versions of the file, the original is here but it was an acid bleach treatment of that photo that is special to me as an artistic piece.

Title	The Dreaming Tree
Taken on	31 August 2007
	Kruger National Park, South Africa
EXIF	f/10 1/500 ISO200 Aperture Priority / Matrix