Tag: quota photo

Quocust

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Quocust = Quota Locust.

Obviously.

I’ve been going through some images from earlier in the year: mainly just to check that they’d all been backed up successfully onto the family server and the external hard drive (they had). And I found myself tinkering in Lightroom with the odd one here or there. This was one of them, taken on our footy club’s weekend away in April. These guys (the insect here, not the footy club) are fairly common visitors to our back garden in Cape Town, although this one was a little further inland.

This is a Garden Locust (Acanthacris ruficornis). Fairly innocuous on his own, but you wouldn’t want too many of them around, nibbling your plants and eating your crops. There’s no scale here, but he’s probably about 7cm long.

I don’t really remember taking this photo, but I actually quite like the way that I’ve thrown caution to the wind as far as considering any sort of balance to the image.

It still works. (For me, at least.)

Stacking up

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The sun is out! A lazy-ish morning, with a nice 6.5km run through the mud in the posh bit of Cape Town, followed by a trip to the butcher and the bottle store has left me with very limited time before I test out my new wares on and around the braai this evening.

And the things I need to do (including this), are stacking up a bit.

With that in mind, please accept this shot of Hout Bay, and then I can get on with my jobs.

See you tomorrow, folks!

Invited back

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Just a quick note to say that I am delighted to have been invited to help out with the school tour to Robben Island again this year. I must be fooling someone doing something right.

Let’s celebrate with a quota photo from the prison museum there:

Looking forward to more amazing learning and bonding experiences, and yes… maybe another traditional solo run around the island in the misty, murky early morning hours.

Day 678 – AGM tonight

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I have an AGM to attend tonight, and I’ve had a frustrating day in the weird (but welcome) Cape Town drizzle. The AGM is online, but still requires my time, and dinner isn’t going to cook itself (because we’re ordering burgers).

So… quota photo time.

This one is another from the top of the mountain. I was trying to sleep when some of the others came back from an (alleged) trempette maigre and told me to get out of bed, find my camera (and tripod) and shoot the moon. I clearly wasn’t going to find any peace and quiet until it was done, so I just got it over with, thus:

Go look at it here too.

You have to wonder who designed and built the monstrosity of a second house next to the original Victorian cottage, but in its defence, it’s got amazing views over Cape Town from the deck, and it makes for an OK silhouette on moonrise photos.

Day 275 – Boxing Day QP

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As ever, I’m writing a few posts in advance over the holiday period (such as it is) so that I can have a little bit of break as well. And because I don’t want to be using up all my words in one go, here’s a quota photo that I took on our recent trip to the Cederberg.

Star trails for dayz (or… er… nightz).

This was the result of 2 hours (and one second, because why not?) of exposure, then an automatic noise clean up on the camera (I won’t be using that feature again – took another 2 hours!) and a bit of tweaking in Lightroom. Bigger and darker here.

I quite like it.
It was almost worth fumbling around in the pitch darkness of the bush in the early hours.

Almost.