I got a new computer at work yesterday. It is a 3GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM and a 160GB SATA hard drive so it is pretty fast. The coolest thing about it though is the tiny case. I had a midi tower case before and have so much more space on my desk now. I just need to do something about the wiring mess behind the monitor.
We had a busy Sunday, this past weekend. Up at 7am and out of the house by 8:30, we were off to Paarl where HPS, the photography club I belong to were having an outing to a steam museum. This museum is normally closed on weekends but we had special dispensation to visit. When I say museum you may get the wrong impression. There are no exhibits as such, just an old loco repair shed with a number of steam engines in various states of repair and disrepair. It looks as though there may be steam enthusiasts working there to repair some of these to their former glory. It is the perfect place for photographers though, with lots of interesting textures and details to photograph.
Amongst the rusted metal and long grass there was the beauty of nature too. I snapped this flower and a nice spider web.
After some hours of moving around taking photographs we gathered in the shed and chatted while we drank coffee and ate biscuits. Around lunchtime people started drifting off and we left, stopping for lunch at McDonalds in Paarl, before continuing on to Oude Molen Farm in Pinelands where we were meeting some friends that keep horses there.
We spent the afternoon there, standing around watching Jane train the horses. Rory and some of the others had short rides. Christopher didn’t want to ride as he was taking photographs. He had been at the steam museum in the morning. It seems that he likes photography and has quite a good eye for composition. Perhaps I will pass my camera on to him when I buy my DSLR. I was snapping away at the horses and people, getting a few nice candid shots. Probably the cutest shot of the afternoon was of a week old foal.
It was nearly 5pm before we left there and after a fruitless search for somewhere to have tea we settled on heading back to the Helderberg, stopping off at the Engen One-Stop for food at the Wimpy. It was after 7pm when we got home, and after watching Joan of Arcadia everyone pretty much collapsed into bed, except for myself, who sat trying to do useful stuff on the computer but kept dozing off. I eventually gave up and went to bed. Even though I slept for seven hours it was a struggle to get up this morning. It was a fun day though.
Went back out to Rooiels on Sunday, with Mela this time, and spent a couple of hours walking, sitting watching the sea and of course taking photographs.
A sunset viewed over two Strand beach landmarks, the fence and pipeline.
My wife, Mela, is almost totally deaf. She wears a bone-conducting hearing aid on a band that fits on her head. People tend to stare at this and she is quite self-conscious about it so she is not fond of being photographed. This afternoon I was shooting some pics of my sons and friends playing in the pool and was standing next to Mela who was sitting on a low wall. I lined up a shot, called to her and clicked the shutter as she looked up. As this was unexpected she didn’t have time to adopt the defensive glare she so often does when she sees the camera pointing at her. An added bonus is that her hearing aid band is not visible in the photo and we both think that this is one of the nicest photos anyone has ever taken of her.
Well, it looks as though summer has arrived. It was a fairly hot day today and I went for a ride on my bike this morning (let’s pretend that I’m writing this before midnight). There was only a light breeze so cycling wasn’t the unpleasant chore it can be when the wind is really blowing, as it so often does here.
The really cool thing about summers here is the long evenings when it’s time to walk on the beach. Went walking there this evening and there were quite a few people out. I was really pleased with the performance of my camera. The old one did not cope well with low light, having only 100 ISO, but as the new one has a minimum ISO of 200 and can do 400, or 800 at lower resolution, I am able to shoot more on these walks. I love taking photos of people just to see the interesting outfits and expressions that can be captured. Here is one from this evening’s walk.
You see some strange things at the beach. Today was not very hot but sunny, about 19°C, and there were quite a few people on the beach, playing games, swimming or just sitting in the sun. Then there was this guy.
He was clad completely in black, jeans, t-shirt, boots, leather jacket, all black. He was alone, flying a kite, and I guessed that he might have come to the beach by motorcycle. I didn’t see any motorcycles parked nearby though.
I lay on the ground and used my close-up lenses to take this. The largest of the flowers was no more than 1cm across.
I was out on the rocks by the sea at Rooiels this afternoon taking some photos when I saw the strangest thing. I spotted a cockroach on a rock near my feet and when I looked at the rocks a little further away, they were crawling with hundreds, if not thousands of small cockroaches. The strange thing is that most of them were moving in the same direction, forming a column that swarmed over the rocks with a definite sense of purpose. I have never seen anything like this before. I wonder what they were doing? Migrating perhaps or heading towards a food source? I didn’t smell anything that would indicate a dead creature nearby but there was a fair amount of decomposing kelp between the rocks there. This is what they looked like.
craniac's place 