HarveyG

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Discovered this today by accident. Super Video made by a DSLR! Love the 100-400mm pump action shottie. Looks like Forces of White vs the Dark Side…hehe. Enjoy!

Photographic Workshops:

Rietvlei is a hidden gem in close proximity to Pretoria (18km’s) and Johannesburg (38 km’s from OR Tambo Int. Airport). The reserve covers an area of almost 3800 hectares (38km²) and can support between 1500-2000 head of game. Currently some 1,600 head of game, including blesbuck, black wildebeest, red hartebeest, eland, Burchell’s zebra, waterbuck, reedbuck, springbuck, mountain reedbuck, steenbuck and grey duiker can be viewed here. There are other species but visit and find them for yourself From your own vehicle it is easy to spot these animals on the open endangered Bankenveld grassland plains. It is a relatively quiet unhurried reserve and well worth a full days visit. Rates are very reasonable.

Long-tailed Widowbird (Euplectes progne) (c) HarveyG Photography

The 60 km’s of tar and dirt roads in the reserve are fairly well maintained and serve for game viewing, park maintenance and for fire breaks in winter. Whilst a normal sedan can easily be driven around on the tar and most of the sand roads, there are some sections that require a vehicle with higher ground clearance. In the wet summer months I found that a double cab / bakkie with 4×4 or difflock capabilities allowed me to get into the odd area that I would not have gone with a family sedan due deep muddy ruts or washaways for fear of getting stuck. This is however the exception rather than the rule. Roads divide the reserve into 31 blocks and are well marked. A map, bird list and rules of the park are given to you when booking in. Rotation grazing is practised on the reserve by routinely burning blocks and using licks as supplementary feeding.

White-throated Swallow (Hirundo albigularis) (c) HarveyG Photography

4 well located Bird-hides (2 on Rietvlei Dam and 1 on Marais Dam with the 4th one centrally located on marshland) and 2 main picnic areas with braai facilities are situated along these roads. There is also a very special river crossing called Otter Bridge with some wonderful wildlife (I won’t spoil it for you, go and check it out). (continue reading…)

Had a quiet cackle when I saw this “What the Duck” dated 2006. It was the 3rd cartoon Aaron Johnson ever created. Should tell you this issue has been around a long time, not just in the DSLR age, but also in the film days.

Many real Pro’s I speak to and commentators at photo forums online complain about the “I have a full-time job” but “I’m an aspirant tog” amateur taking away Pro’s business, and rightly so; Naturally it is wrong if they present themselves as a “Professional Photographer” simply because they just bought a kit DSLR for $1000-00 with two crappy kit lenses but it LOOKS good. Me, I’d rather see better photographs on the web and in *groan* Facebook…so let ‘em learn but NOT at the expense of paying clients who expect a level of professionalism not just with the photographs but with the entire experience. Customers will also have to educate themselves as to quality, or pay the school fees, to the detriment of the rest of the Industry who are then tainted with the same tar brush. Suffices to say any industry has this problem – people with full time income generating jobs trying to get into other markets… [Note: I still do not palm myself off as a "Pro Photographer", despite having shot events, commissions since the late 70's, and product and wildlife since the early 80's up till today.]

The yellow what-sit with stripy eye. Excuse the quality!

Actually any wildlife tog should have a mental code of practice…

I’m the first to admit that I am not the world’s biggest twitcher. I battle to identify many of the obscure lesser seen species, especially those darned LBJ’s (how many do we have?!) and Eagles perched in a tree 400m away or soaring in the sky… I don’t race around the countryside looking for that elusive species. I don’t make use of playback vocalisations to call them in. I go. I see what I see. I’m happy to be out there, no just so that I can tick it. I carry a few bibles with me and I always ask someone who knows better than I especially the bloke with the monster prime lens Mind you, I’ve spoken to some who couldn’t tell the difference between a Heron and a Hadeda but they had all the latest gear and best glass, bodies…and bank manager!

My friend David from Seokama can identify LBJ’s and others from their calls without even setting eye on them. The yellow what-sit pictured (L) was hastily photographed there out the car window before it took off.  Terribly handy to have Dave on my workshops with me

I do try to be as unobtrusive and non-invasive as possible. I often miss shots because of this. Or I’ll let someone else push his way into the hide before me to race off and grab the best seat…even though he and his entire family arrived after me…I know that, by them being the impatient kind & pushing me out of the way, if they don’t at least see 14 elephants at the hide followed by a Leopard and her cub with a kill in a tree, they’ll be outta there before I even set up my gear…aaah peace

The last time this happened to my wife and I (Lake Panic, KNP), she spotted 2x and I spotted 1x Bushbuck right next to the hide alley. We stood silently and let the noisy Homo Sapiens pass us, and then resumed watching the buck feeding… The previous time it was at a hide near Satara, and 2x Klipspringer were so close to the viewing window we could touch them, but half a dozen holiday makers came and went in 5 minutes without even spotting them. The rest of us were going to mention it to them but they never gave us a chance

/end Rant

Once in the hide, I did get some great shots of a croc eye abstract and a terrapin taking a piggy back ride on a hippo and the Klipspringers. The birds were a bit shy but we did see a few. A bad day in a hide beats a good day at the studio.

Here’s a few tips (saves me typing them) from BirdGuide.com and most of this is common sense, but even that’s not so common any more

Be patient and be thoughtful of nature first and others second. Your photo album will love you for it! So will the critters. So will I when we share a hide in Africa somewhere Take a plastic bag for your own rubbish. I’ve often cleaned up others rubbish and tossed it at the camp or the next stopover.

PS: So what bird IS that above? PPS: What tree IS it sitting in? I know, do you?

I recently noticed a few shots online that had the dreaded dust bunnies in them and this prompted today’s posting. Note this only applies to DSLR or Medium Format with interchangeable lenses and mirror mechanisms, not to your mirrorless Point and Shoot or Bridge Camera UNLESS they have interchangeable lenses where the sensor is visible and prone to contamination.

A few days after I bought my Tokina 12-24mm f/4.0 ATX Pro DX, I was at the coast. With the intention to do UWA scapes with the D80 (It’s ISO 100 and long exposure is superb on the CCD). The camera is seldom used and I also rarely remove the Sigma 28-70mm f/2.8 that’s on it. Less lens changes, less dust, or so the theory goes. Camera has done under 6000 images in 4 years.

So I get up at 4am and head off to the local lake district in Sedgefield for a few pre-dawn landscapes. Take a few shots, chimp at the screen. Everything looks awesome (LCD’s always make everything look awesome…)

Get back to the apartment and fire up the laptop, offload the images…enlarge…and there they are…”dust” bunnies.

King Fisher River Lagoon - Dust Bunnies - Click Image for full size - Blue circle is a "Hot" Pixel - more on that in another posting.

What a waste of time! No wait, I can clone them out in PP. But still, what a waste of time if I had just spent a bit more time on checking the SENSOR pre-shoot. I honestly thought that because I rarely remove the lens (continue reading…)