OK, back to posting. Connie’s off to Daytona Beach until Sunday…the Florida Ladies of Elks Conference is going on. They talked about him going and he decided not to go for a couple of reasons…there aren’t many decent photo opportunities this time of year in that area, it’s only about 40 miles or so to Black Point Drive at Titusville but it’s still too much summer for many birds to be around. Add in the fact that it’s mostly designed to be a Ladies thing meaning there isn’t anything for him to do except the dinner on Friday night and he decided not to go. The Ladies group up at the Punta Gorda lodge does a bus trip so she signed up for that…Bloody Mary’s and silly games both ways…and so far she’s having a decently good time. She did have to get a new charging cable for her AirPods…Neil didn’t do a good job of making sure she had adequate electronic charging capabilities along with her…and he’s solved that problem by adding verify operations to the master packing list.

She was originally going to room with her friend Suzanne but Suzanne tripped and needed stitches in her lip so she canceled out…and it turned out that one of the Punta Gorda ladies was sharing 3 to a single room so one of them moved over and is Connie’s roommate which means she’ll split the cost there. Neil is meeting Suzanne’s husband Joe at the North Fort Myers lodge for fish dinner tonight…he tried to convince them that Joe should stay home and do husband things but no go there.

Nothing much else going on…they’ve got in a request to the HoA people to replace their garage carriage lights as the sun for the past 10 years has deteriorated the plastic. Since it’s an HoA you need to have approval to do anything outside and despite carriage lights being pretty much a standard thing they want a picture of what we’re planning on putting up…so he’s taking a trip to Home Depot to get some pictures today. He finds it hard to believe that the dozens of replacements he’s seen of the lights on other houses in the development all got approval but rules are rules and we would hate to get on the bad side of the HoA Gestapo ya know.

Ok, let’s get back to images from Botswana along the Chobe River which forms the northern border of the country with Namibia.

Last time we talked about nictating membranes that some birds and reptiles have to protect their eyes…it’s basically a second set of eyelids that are semi-transparent and usually move in a different direction…most eyelids go up and down but nictating ones generally move diagonally from the lower rear to the upper front. He was hoping that the shot I used last time had a corresponding one with the nictating visible but alas, he didn’t find one…but he did find one of a different Pied Kingfisher with an almost identical pose.

No eyelid

Nictating closed.

I’m sure they can’t see quite as well through the nictating one but use the keen sight to home in on prey and close the nictating just before hitting the water to protect their eye.

The second thing we talked about was the lack of depth of field getting both birds on a branch in focus so here’s an example of that. In this example…the light is coming from the left for just about direct sidelight of the shot and the perch is closer to the camera on the left side since the perch is in shadow. This means the female (single breast band) to the right is actually further away then her mate (double breast band) to the left…that makes sene since she actually appears about the same size and as in most species the females are larger. Pied’s are about 9 inches long which in this crop makes the image about 20 inches wide. He was using his 600mm lens and his nifty PhotoPills app tells him that for 20 inches wide field of view the birds are 28 feet away…and at that distance the depth of field is a mere 3 inches. Autofocus preferably latches on the closest subject (the male on the left in this case) so she is not as sharp as he is. He could have used a smaller aperture to get more depth but even going to f11 instead of f6.3 only increases it to 5 inches at the loss of 2 stops of light and thus his 1/2000 shutter speed would have been reduced to 1/500 and while that would have worked for a these perched birds it definitely wouldn’t have been enough to freeze any motion and wouldn’t have gotten both in focus anyway. As an alternative…he could have taken a burst focused on the male, shifted focus points and taken another burst with the female in focus and blended them later on. However…given movements and head turns and whatnot that’s a lot more difficult than it sounds and unless subjects are really still rarely results in a good final output…and the opportunity didn’t last that long anyway. So…that’s why last time I only showed you the image of the male. 

OK…moving on to new stuff.

Hamerkok…a weird looking shore bird.

Pied Kingfisher launching.

Impala coming down for a drink.

Kudu bull (one of the largest antelope species)  with an Oxpecker on its back. Their horns reach the full 2.5 twists of spiraling averaging 47 inches long at about 2 years of age and an adult is larger than an elk but smaller than a moose…this one is a Greater Kudu and stands about 5 feet tall at the shoulder and weighs 400-600 pounds. 

Neil can report that they taste pretty good…very lean very dark red meat like venison or elk so excellent paired with some mushroom sauce and a nice red wine…in fact due to the very low fat content and almost non existent marbling in herd critter meat they’re almost always better with sauce. He’s not sure whether the ones he ate were wild harvested or farmed but given their relatively scarcity in the wild probably farmed as hunting wouldn’t provide a reliable supply.

Closeup of the same bull.

African Darter…or anhinga here…this one is female since she has the brownish chest and head. Like cormorants…they hunt underwater and are frequently seen (like cormorants) perched with their wings spread to dry.

Nile Crocodile…this one was about 12-14 feet long. They sit on the bank and open or close their mouth as needed to maintain body temperature.

Marabou Stork…another of those birds with a face that only a mother could love. Huge bird…8-10 foot wingspan and stands about 5 feet tall and 20 pounds. Like herons and egrets…they’re mostly fish eaters but again like herons will eat anything they can swallow.

Waterbuk…very strange looking critter. Neil can’t remember if he got any more shots besides this one.

Elephant crossing the river and having a shower.

Bombs away.

Neil processed this one three different ways…let me know in the comments which one you prefer and why. All the same individual taken from about 20 yards away…you can see the busted right side tusk and the damage to his (at least we think it’s a male since you can’t see the breasts/teats under her chin left ear.

Closeup full color

Full color zoomed out shot

Full black and white and high key (blown out sky) since elephants don’t have a lot of color and it seemed to him that the blues and greens draw attention away from the subject.

Elephant left in color since he does have a little but the background saturation reduced to just a few percent. Neil actually prefers either this one or the full on B&W depending on which time he looks at them. He definitely likes the wider shot with the splashing water better than the closeup.

African Jicana…a wader about 12 inches long and maybe 18 or so standing vertically. They have huge feet which allow them to walk across linllypads easily…although not really visible or spread out in this shot as it’s on land in the grass he’s got some later in the week that show the size of the feet…which when spread are almost as large as the body is long.

Elephant family getting a drink while being photobombed by a Gray Heron.

A different family from the other side…although again 4 of them but you really need to count legs to see all 4. Both of these were relatively close to sunset and he really didn’t notice the difference in color temperature between the two shots until I just pointed it out to him. They were taken with different Nikon Z8 bodies and lenses…but both are setup the same way for ease of use so he’s got no explanation for the difference other than he keeps white balance (which controls the color temp and blue/orange cast to the shots) in automatic and the software made different decisions. As he recalls this second one seems more accurate to what the eye saw. They were near this area of the beach for awhile and the backgrounds are different so maybe the one above was taken longer before sunset and the golden hour really got going…or then again maybe they were a half mile down or upstream, a lot of the memory runs together and he’s too lazy to go look at the actual capture times. (Neil note…drat, darned bear made me go ahead and look…first one was at 1040 in the morning and the second one at 1737 near sunset so they’re different groups and time of day for sure.)

This one in the late afternoon decided he wanted a mud bath after crossing the river…he was in the same group that crossed 5 or 6 shots back in the post. Not a full adult but a teenager and both he and the rest of his herd spent 10 minutes tossing mud or water all over themselves.

Getting on towards sunset…they found this impala stepping down for a drink. Due to the slope of the beach they have to get into a really awkward position (although not as awkward as a giraffe does) to drink and that makes them slower to react. There be crocs in this river and drinkers tend to be skittish…this one jumped back several times as waves from the boats washed up near him…because crocs attacking you start as little waves just like that.

Jumping back just in case.

Another one from the morning coming down to drink.

And also this relatively newborn calf…barely up to the adult knee.

Ok, really getting to sunset now…and ya know about life how sometimes it gives you lemons? In the case of wildlife photography the lemon you get near the end of golden hour and sunset is really low light levels. These Helmeted Guinea Fowl are about the size of a large duck/small turkey and mostly run/walk instead of flying. This group happened to be in shade which meant that using a high enough shutter speed to get a sharp in focus shot would have resulted in crazy high ISO levels and a whole lot of noise which means not a great picture. The other option is to make lemonade…which in this case means you use a slow shutter speed (this was at 1/20 second) and pan with the running birds (they hardly ever just walk) and shoot long bursts hoping to get the bird enough in focus to be recognizable and the background blurred to show the motion. Neil sez that Connie wasn’t along to get the artsy fartsy shot so he had to do it instead. The drawback to this technique…although it does produce a different sort of shot…is that you shoot a lot of long bursts and the trick is to keep the subject pretty well in the same part of the viewfinder while panning. That’s hard because they don’t run at a constant speed so you end up with dozens (or in his case several hundred) really terrible shots in order to get one usable one. He wishes this bird was slightly more in focus albeit still blurry and realized after the fact that he should have shot some at 1/20, some at 1/30, and some at 1/40 or 1/50 to have some different options to choose one. Out of his several (like going on 300) shots…there were just 2 that were worth processing and the other one had some additional composition issues. It’s not a shot he is going to try to reproduce a lot…but as I said…lemons and lemonade.

With that…the sun had set on Day 2 so we headed back. Here are a couple he took as we motored down the river towards the dock at Kasane and as we slowed or arrival. Both are iPhone shots and the orangey sky is due to Apple’s night mode processing…it was really pretty much full dark to the eye. The first one was still a little orangey to the eye but the second one just looked dark.

They headed back to the lodge (maybe a 10 minute truck ride) for dinner and if he recalls correctly that was the first meal they had of kudu…served by candlelight at the lodge. After dinner…download images for backup, charge batteries, and bed since 0500 comes early and he was still recovering from jet lag.

Interesting things found on the net.

Actually this one was found on the trip, not on the net…apparently they don’t want you to flush what you came into the bathroom to do.

Cyas.