While scrolling through my news feed on Facebook last Tuesday, I came across a post by Glynis Bowie asking for identification on a bird she had seen the previous weekend at Strandfontein Sewage Works. Me being the way I am with waders (In other words, useless) – I relied on the comments of others to…
This is a continuation of the previous post. We woke up fairly on Thursday and first looked at the forecast, so we could decide our next plan of action. We had paid for 2 nights of accommodation already, but spending a second night in weather that would keep us indoors seemed pointless. We could rather…
Both Monique and I have been planning to get away for a while now, and while our initial plans were to head east and camp in the Wilderness, with winter now fairly close we decided that it may be rather risky at this time of the year. Instead we decided to look elsewhere. I initially…
My last pelagic trip was three years ago. Funnily enough, it was three years ago almost to the day (3 days off). In my last entry I managed to amass plenty of new lifers, but ended my previous post with the sentence “Next time, I’ll be setting my sights on the Pintado Petrel…” And so…
I woke up on Sunday morning with Monique doing a “Women’s Walk” in Cape Town, and thus had the morning to myself and had planned to head through to Kogelbay and try some surf photography again. The swell forecast was good and the surface wind was forecast as a moderate South Easter, usually good for…
Just outside of the Houwhoek area of the Overberg is a small farming town by the name of Botrivier. People traveling to Caledon from Cape Town would be familiar with the general area. During summer, dry open fields stretch into the distance. In the winter months these fields turn green, and for a brief period…
After a night of little sleep, I woke up to a sunny Autumn day in April and with my girlfriend Monique feeling a bit under the weather I hoped to try and makes things a bit better by planning a spontaneous mission. I opened up Google maps and began looking at possible destinations that would…
Recently there have been several rarities pop up around the Cape Town area, but I had yet to twitch any of them, despite being on my to-do lists. However, on Saturday 5th February Trevor Hardaker dropped me a message letting me know that him and Margaret were going through to Hermanus to see the Elegant…
It was Megan’s birthday a couple of months ago and as a gift from her grandparents, they gave her access to their holiday home in Onrus for a weekend. After an initial delay, the time had come for us to venture eastward, for the last weekend of July. I am not a stranger to Onrus…
While looking back through my hard drive photographs this week I came across a mostly unpublished series of images from a trip I took about 4 years ago now, to the Drakensberg. While at the that time I had flown to Johannesburg many times before, and spent time in Pretoria quite a lot, I had…
After some very good rainfalls on Friday evening, the weather had cleared by Sunday and unlike the previous day, there was hardly any wind around. Not wanting to waste the rare pleasure of a warm and sunny winter’s day, we headed through to Rietvlei in Milnerton at around 09:30. I had previously been to Rietvlei…
Megan and myself were lucky enough to be spending this Sunday with the Hardakers, whom I hadn’t had the pleasure of birding with properly since our last twitch of the Marabou Stork in 2013. The original plan was for us to head out on Saturday and target the Antarctic Terns in Jacobs Bay, and the…
This was the second consecutive weekend that I would be in Cape Town, and luckily for me the Snowy Egret was still around, giving me something to do while Megan was at work on Saturday. Saturday was off to a rough start, with having woken up at 4am with back pain and struggling to sleep….
In the middle of last week I made a post about my first twitch of the Snowy Egret which was spotted along the Black River near Cape Town a week ago now, I also mentioned how short I was on time — with my original twitch being done during my lunch break. Because I was…
Don’t let the title mislead you, this has nothing to do with the Cradle of Filth song by the same name. This post is delayed by about 2 months, since the shoot was originally done in April — but I felt the need to finally get some of these images off my hard drive and…
Last month Megan and myself were brain storming nearby locations to shoot and she mentioned the Taal Monument being a place she wanted to do a fashion shoot at, so we decided we’d make the 40km trip from Somerset West on the Sunday morning and scout out the Taal Monument’s possibilities. The Taal Monument (Afrikaans…
After shooting on my Canon 50D for nearly 4 years, I decided it was time for an upgrade and ordered a 70D. Due to my interests in both landscape photography as well as birding, it was the perfect camera for the budget that I had and aligned well with my needs. The 70D is the…
Lourensford Wine Estate in Somerset West is a location that I managed to shoot in my early years of photography, but due to fairly strict security I haven’t been in contact with them recently in order to shoot inside the farm. A couple of weeks ago however, I came across a post in my Facebook…
Recently I’ve been trying to find some new locations to shoot, and while I had pinned down a few within the 30 kilometer range, it’s not always easy to predict a good sunset ahead of time that would cater to driving to the location without a severe risk of disappointment. I ended up turning to…
It’s been exactly two years since my last visit to De Hoop Nature Reserve, until this weekend that is. On Friday evening, Megan and myself discussed what we would be doing the next day and I asked her which of the Western Cape bird species she’d most like to see in person. Her response was…