South Luangwa-Ghost of Photography Past

Hi all,

To start with, I am apologising for the lack of posts on this blog (to be precise, 0 posts in 8 months). This has been down to a number of reasons, those mainly being exams, trips and laziness. But hopefully I will redeem myself slightly with the post today.

At the beginning of July, I embarked on a school trip to Malawi as a volunteer for the charity, Ripple Africa. Before we did the volunteering work, we all went on safari in Zambia at South Luangwa national park for 2 days (originally meant to be 3 days). Unfortunately though, there were a few complications along the way. One being an over 12 hour delay for the flight to Kenya meaning we missed a day of safari. There was still lots to see nevertheless.

The first photos I took were actually in the campsite. This was down to the large numbers of vervet monkeys roaming around which actually proved to be quite fun subjects to photograph.

The first trip out of the camp was on the first evening. Upon starting the safari, we got news of a pride of lions somewhere in the park. This meant we headed straight to where the lions were, before it got dark. 

We were also taken on a night watch once the sun went down. Although I wasn't really able to take photos, I still enjoyed myself. We managed to spot (by we, I mean the guides) a serval, mongoose, elephant shrews and a chameleon. Yes, one of the guides spotted a chameleon, 5 metres away in a bush, at night, with nothing but a torch.

Now for the photos I took the following morning and evening, I will just upload them without explaining each and every photo.

                                        

After the sun had gone down, we were taken on another night watch. There was a bit of a surprise waiting for us however. While driving along, we saw another jeep parked at the side of the road. The reason for this was a leopard hunting impala just 10m away from the road. We followed it for a bit, with me constantly cursing the night for being there when the leopard was (very slow shutter speeds and high ISOs). Here are a few pics anyway.

Seriously edited

Other wildlife that I saw once at the camp in Malawi include a black mamba (no photo), african fish eagles, giant midge clouds, scorpions and an assortment of moths.

Found in someones shoe

That's not a dust cloud, those are midges

Snowing Midges

The dark clouds just over the lake are midges

Some sort of tiger moth

Daphnis nerii

Size comparison: My hand is 20cm long

I hope you have enjoyed looking through the images taken on the trip. Hopefully I will upload more often although I can't make any promises with my A-level year approaching. Nevertheless, I will try to get out and take photos as well as posting them.

All images © Samuel Aron

Christmas squirrels - Switzerland

Hi all,

I recently came back from a skiing holiday in Switzerland. While I was not skiing, I was off in the local woodland taking photographs. This mainly included red squirrels but also included some small birds such as crested tits. Luckily, the squirrels weren't at all timid, meaning I was able to photograph them using my 50mm lens, although the majority of photos were take with my 300mm zoom.
The squirrels would often come running towards me in search of food.

On the first day I photographed them, I didn't bring any food with me so they ended up being disappointed. Darker forms of the red squirrels could also be seen.

The squirrels were coming so close I decided to experiment with my 50mm lens. Even with this lens they were difficult to photograph due to how close they were coming.

To give you an idea of the proximity

Later on, I managed to get my hands on some on some hazelnuts, being sold specifically for feeding to the squirrels. Whilst looking for squirrels, I found a tree stump with a sprinkling of snow on and a small fir tree growing next to it. I thought that it would work well as a Christmasy photo of the squirrels if I could get one to sit there long enough for a photo. I placed a hazelnut in a hole in the top of the tree stump in an attempt to attract the squirrels to the stump. It took a while but I managed to finally get a photo.

I later found a bird table in the woodland with plenty of bird seed on it. Here I saw many small woodland birds, flitting back and forth to get food, but my favourites were the crested tits that visited. These were the first I had ever seen so I was keen to get a shot of them. The light was awful that day (lowest ISO being 1250 at relatively slow shutter speeds) and there weren't many natural perches with decent backgrounds. I couldn't set up my own perch so I settled for a small branch that was sticking out just behind the table and stood in a rather uncomfortable position for quite a long time in order to get a nice background. To add to the long wait, my camera decided to stop focussing for a while meaning that when the crested tits finally landed on the branch, there was nothing I could do at all. The shutter didn't even fire when using manual. After a lot of frustration I finally got a shot.

A couple of days later, I went back to the woodland to photograph the squirrels again. Unfortunately the squirrels weren't showing as well as they had done on the first day and the light was even worse. I still managed to photograph them but in a different area. In particular, on a fallen trees' roots. This created some interesting opportunities.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

All images © Samuel Aron.

Hyde and seek

Yesterday, I met up with some other photographers to photograph the birds in Hyde park. Although lighting was generally rubbish, I was pleased with some of the results. The title is referring to the look for the owls (especially the little owls) which kept themselves quite well hidden and probably would have remained so without help.

We started off at the Long Water. Here we saw a few species of gulls and ducks, including shovelers. Now and then you could see coots sparring, cormorants flying past and great-crested grebes diving but I stuck to the more common species as these were a bit too far away for me.

From there, we moved to an area where we could feed the birds which included parakeets, great tits and of course, pigeons. I tried hard to get a photograph of the parakeets in flight but proved too difficult  for me without a tripod (very stupid mistake not bringing one). I had to settle for the perched birds.

From there we moved on to the little owls. The male and female were in neighbouring trees though proved difficult to find at first. They were both high up but the females eyes staring down at me were hard to miss. 

The tawny owl was next on the list of things to see, which we were shown by a local birder. This is a female looking very snug.

All images © Samuel Aron