Last weekend we spend a glorious two days at Walkersons outside Dullstroom on the way to Lydenberg in Mpumalanga. As is usually the case in this area the weather can be highly variable. We were fortunate enough to get one blue sky early morning.

‘Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better’

 Albert Einstein

One of the species of birds I have found difficult to see, let alone photograph, have been Cuckoos. You would think that with fifteen types of Cuckoo seen in southern Africa  there would be common sightings, but there are not. You are more likely to hear them especially the Red-chested, Klaas and Diderick Cuckoos which are often heard but seldom seen.

Most of the Cuckoos seen in southern Africa are large, between 28cm and 40 cm. The largest Cuckoos are the Striped and Great Spotted being between 38 and 44 cm. The next smallest group of Cuckoos are around 28mm to 34 mm in size and include the Common, African Red-chested Black, Thick-billed and Jacobin. The smallest Cuckoos are the green Cuckoos, the African Emerald, Klaas and Diderick Cuckoo.

The Cuckoos you hear most often are the Red-chested Cuckoo also called the ‘Piet-mevrou’,  an onomatopeic name. You will also often hear the Diderick and Klaas’s Cuckoo. Last Saturday morning, I was fortunate enough to see a Common Cuckoo chick being fed by a female Cape Wagtail. The African and Common Cuckoos are difficult to distinguish apart without hearing the African Cuckoo’s call or seeing the markings under their tail feathers.

All Cuckoos are brood parasites but they are not the only ones. Honeyguides, Honeybirds, Indigo birds and Whydahs are too. This behaviour is characterised by  the female Cuckoo waiting for the host nesting bird to leave its nest to feed. The Cuckoo lays one egg in the host’s nest. The parasite’s egg is usually similar in colouring to the host bird’s eggs. Critically, the incubation period of the Cuckoo’s egg is shorter than that of its host’s eggs, giving the Cuckoo’s chick an advantage over the host’s chicks. The result is that the host bird normally only rears one chick, the parasitic Cuckoo chick.

I was fortunate enough to see what I think was a Common Cuckoo chick being fed by a female Cape Wagtail.

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Most Cuckoos parasitise a number of different host species. Typical host species are robin-chats, shrikes, starlings, babblers, bulbuls, warblers, sunbirds, weavers and wagtails. I find the choice of sunbirds and wagtails surprising given their small size.

Usually the Cuckoo chick has the same colour gape with similar markings as the host bird’s chick. It is this colour match when the outsized chick opens its beak which is thought to induce the host bird to feed the chick.

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This little Cape Wagtail female worked endlessly to feed this African Cuckoo chick. The chick called perpetually with its squeaky wheeze. The Cuckoo chick would watch the Wagtail and as soon as she had something in her beak, the Cuckoo chick would fly over to her and demand to be fed.

Rael and Helene Loon have a very good chapter on brood parasitic behaviour in their book, Birds -The Inside Story.

A Cuckoo is distinctive in flight. It has long and pointed wings and usually flies fast and direct. Cuckoos are generally insectivores so presumably they choose their host on that basis. Being insectivores they usually migrate north during the cold months because of the dearth of insects in southern Africa in winter. This is common among many bee-eaters, swifts and swallows and some Kingfishers and storks.

Only about one percent of birds use brood parasitism as a breeding technique. Using almost no energy to build a nest and raise their chick improves the adult Cuckoo’s survival rate. Some Cuckoos can lay over 20 eggs in a breeding season. The Cuckoo chicks are altricial meaning that must be reared and fed by the parent/host from birth until they are developed enough to feed themselves. I find it incredible that Cuckoos all have their own calls and songs (except the Common Cuckoo which makes almost no sound) despite not being reared by its parent.

Cuckoos do not have it all their own way. Host birds will mob an adult Cuckoo if they see one. Some hosts such as weavers even try to make the entrance to their nests too small for the Cuckoo to get in to lay its egg.

“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.“

 Richard Feynman

Cuckoos add one extra weave of colour and texture to mother nature’s tapestry. In nature, the more you look the more you find and more you learn.

Seek to understand nature, marvel at its interconnectedness and then let it be.

Have fun

Mike

This is the third and last post from our recent trip with CNP to Kagga Kamma. The photographic workshop at Kagga Kamma was designed to expand our wildlife skills exposing us to landscape photography and its compositional imperative. We also learnt about light painting, high dynamic ranges and panoramas. The weather worked against us, so we did not get to do star trails but that was also part of the programme. For all enthusiastic wildlife photographers, like myself, spreading your wings to include landscape is a must. Shooting landscapes shows you aspects about your camera which you are unlikely to have ever used; will enhance your appreciation of composition; and will expand your toolkit of photographic techniques. This post shows some of my first attempts at formal panoramas. Once you get started with panoramas you will also be impressed by the software which is capable of stitching a suite of images together to form the panoramas.

Haven’t you wished you could capture what you were seeing when standing admiring the vista stretching out in front of you, where its immensity, colour and beauty were spellbinding? Don’t you wish you could capture some of that grandeur and awe of that view in an image?  You can! Panorama photography can capture the grandeur, colour and beauty. You will not have the wind in your hair but when you look at the image you will feel like you are back there.

To fully appreciate the panoramas  you will need to double-click on the image. The files are large so it can take 45 seconds to load the image then scroll across it.

Increasingly, in urbanised communities, where densification is the prevailing trend, the ability to look out over vast, magnificent vistas filled with colour and light is limited and when you can it is soul cleansing.

A panoramic image is a composition comprising a suite of images which are digitally stitched together. The stitching is done using specialIsed software. You have a choice – you choose how many images you want to take over a selected arc of vision. This arc can be can size depending on the size lens you are using and your width of vision. You can take a 360 degree panorama, if you have an unobstructed view. The software needs around a 30% image overlap to be able to sufficiently align the images to provide a good stitch. The more adventurous panorama photographers can take three or more levels of  panoramic arcs. Always remember that a 30% image overlap is required vertically and horizontally for a good image stitch. If you are taking an arc of five images at three sequential levels, you will take fifteen images in total. When each image is 35 Mb (megabytes) the resultant image will be around 0.5 Gb, not insignificant. This is big data stuff!!

The next image is an example of fifteen images stitched together an arc of five images and three levels of arcs.

As with all landscapes, composition is crucial. You just have to plan your image more carefully. given that it will take longer to take all fifteen or so images. If it is a still clear sky day then this is not a consideration. If the wind is blowing and the clouds are moving you will need to make a judgement call. Too much grass, tree or cloud movement will blur parts of the image.

One of the tricky aspects of panoramas is that the intensity and quality of light is likely to vary considerably across a 180 degree arc. The exposure rules still apply  – ensure you do not blow the highlights or lose detail in the very dark areas.

The clouds do provide greater depth and mood to the image and the cirrus clouds can provide leading lines.

One of the insights Lou shared was that wildlife scenes, be they herds of Elephant down at Elephant valley on the Chobe river or groups of animals in the Masa Mara, are effectively moving landscapes and a sound understanding of the techniques and compositional imperatives in landscapes will make better wildlife photographs – wise words indeed.

Thanks once again to the CNP team for a really interesting workshop in an unusual setting learning new things!!!

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand,”

Albert Einstein

Seek to understand nature, marvel at its interconnectedness and then let it be.

Have fun

Mike

This is the second post in a series of three from our recent trip to Kagga Kamma in the Swartruggens region in the south eastern Cederberg in the Western Cape. It shows two sets of images. This was a CNP workshop designed to expose wildlife photographers to new aspects of outdoor photography and new techniques.

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”

― Aldous Huxley

This first set of six images shows a single exposure and deep depth of field format. The second set of six images show the High Dynamic Range (HDR) technique where multiple exposures are combined into one resultant image.

Single exposures

The weathered sandstone rock formations make perfect landscape subjects.

The Swartruggens area is characterised by its reddish brown, weathered sandstone formations, typical of the Cederberg region. Its flora tends to be the drier mountain fynbos. It is largely treeless and is dominated by a variety of shrubs with interesting local names such as kakiebos, klaaslouwbos, koringbos, renosterbos, sneeubos, wolwedoring, taaibos and skilpadbessie

The mountains in the area comprise almost entirely of sedimentary Table Mountain Sandstone. The Swartruggens region,  of the Cederberg mountains, sustains an arid type of fynbos–karroid scrub type of flora.

The remarkable variation in underlying soil structure and rainfall, leads to an extremely diverse flora, which varies from mountain fynbos to succulents you would expect to see in the Karoo. The climate is one of extremes, with temperatures range from –6°C, with snow and ice on some high-altitude peaks in winter, to over 46°C on the karroid plains in summer.

When you walk around the rock formations you cannot help but get the sense you are walking on the seabed. Even the dry fynbos and some of the succulents look like they belong on the seabed.

In 2005, University of Stellenbosch scientists found a 450-million-year-old fossil of a fish in the Cederberg, the oldest fish fossil yet found in Africa.The fish lived at a time when there was life only in the oceans, when Africa, India, South America and Antarctica were joined in the single land mass of Gondwanaland. At that time the Cederberg area would have been under the sea.

Multiple exposures

We now move to the High Dynamic Range (HDR) set of images. HDR is a set of techniques used in photography to reproduce a greater dynamic range of luminosity than is possible using standard single exposure photographic techniques. HDR images can represent more accurately the range of intensity levels found in real scenes.

These are the first HDRs I have taken and I am ‘tickled pink’ with the effect. To achieve the effect, five images were taken in the bracket group. The exposure in each bracket is progressively incremented by one F stop. We used the Nik HDR software to combine the images. The process is simple.

The first HDR was of our cave at the Lodge. Kagga Kamma offers accommodation in 15 caves and four huts. The caves blend in superbly with the surrounding rock. The walls and roof of the cave are all man-made but well shaped and painted to match the surrounding rock.

I was amazed at the detail the HDR technique produces. The greater exposure range gives improved definition even though all the images were taken at an F22 aperture. Just double click on the image to see a larger, more detailed version.

The mid-image in the five image bracket group must be as close to the correct exposure as you can get.

Obviously, when you are going to bracket five images, you must be sure the clouds are not moving too fast otherwise the software algorithm will not be able to effectively combine the images.

“Distance lends enchantment to the view.”

― Mark Twain

The clouds really helped provide a more interesting sky.

I am really impressed with the software technology used to combine the images into a single HDR image. Once my excitement over the newly used software technologies has abated, I will concentrate more on my composition. Landscapes are a wonderful medium to draw photographer’s attention to composition.

In next week’s post, I will show six panoramic images. Again, the software technology used to stitch the images together is mind-blowing – there are some clever people in this world!!!!

“To learn to see- accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and allow things to come up to it; defer judgment, and acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche,

Seek to understand nature, marvel at its interconnectedness and then let it be.

Have fun,

Mike

Kagga Kamma, is the “place of the bushmen”. It is located in the Swartruggens plateau  in the south-easterly extension of the Cederberg Mountains. The reserve is known for its scenic beauty, dramatic rock formations and a rich collection of Bushman/San rock paintings, some of which are estimated to be 6000 years old.

Our latest trip was a landscape and night photography workshop with CNP Safaris, part of Coetzer Nature Photography group of companies. It was a four-day workshop focussed on this rugged part of the western Cape.

The workshop was timed to coincide with the new moon when the light from the moon would be minimal allowing for the best light for star trails. Being a workshop, we were up 45 minutes before sunrise to get into the right position for the sunrise. The light was usually good for about 90 minutes to two hours after sunrise before the contrast increased the harshness of the light to the point where we packed up our kit and went for breakfast.

After breakfast we would adjourn to the conference room to have discussions on new techniques and download and edit our images from the previous night and latest dawn. Doing landscapes during the day and night photography is hard going, so the ideal is to have two days focussed on landscape photography and two days focussed on night photography.

Being a wildlife photographer, I am used to high ISOs, fast shutter speeds, wide apertures and narrow depth of fields. Landscape photography is completely different. The subject is static; the ISOs are 50 to 100; shutter speeds are seconds not fractions of a second and the apertures are as smallest your can achieve, f22 to f32 to  give the greatest depth of field.

Lou Coetzer highlighted the importance of composition in landscapes. The strange aspect is that you can intellectually know about leading lines, triangles, golden means, but intellectually knowing something and putting the knowledge into practice are two different things. Only once you start to look for key elements in the field which will make the composition compelling does the knowledge begin to develop into an ability to see and your compositional skills start to be honed.

Knowing something is different to doing it – skill is knowledge effectively applied!!!!

The weather was unusual. The western Cape has a mediterranean climate. At this time of the year we were supposed to have sunny days and clear night skies – haha!!

We had lots of cloud for two and a half days. This worked against our night photography but helped our landscapes as the cloud formations filled the blue sky by adding drama, colour and leading lines. The cumulus and heavy cumulonimbus thunderclouds added the drama and the cirrus provides some interesting line formations.

Kagga Kamma is a private game reserve situated in the Swartruggens wilderness area.The reserve is about three and a half hours drive from Cape Town, 350 kilometres. What makes this area ideal for landscape photography. It is ‘big sky’ country. The closest town is Ceres and there is little ambient light from the town at night so, on a cloudless night, the sky is jewelled with stars for 360 degrees and the milky way in the southern direction. The area also has extensive sandstone outcrops which are heavily weathered making the rock formations ‘other worldly’. With a little imagination, we could see sculptures of  people and animals in the sandstone formations.

The countryside is rugged. I never appreciated how hard landscape photographers work for their images. In wildlife photography, we put ourselves in position, using vehicles and boats, for our subject to come to us or passed us. In landscape photography you must go to the subject – it does not move. There is a lot of walking required to look for the right position to show off those leading lines and compelling compositions.

Composition and perspective take on altogether more importance. In fact, I expect my heightened awareness of composition to help my wildlife photography.

We would also go out for the hour before sunset and wait for about half an hour after sunset. Before sunset, the colours are warm and the contrast in the light soft. In the half an hour after sunset, the warm light reflected on the clouds becomes increasingly saturated creating some wonderful reds, oranges and yellows which are set against the night blue sky with the brightest stars starting to peek through the last light of the day.

After sunsets, we would have supper in the boma at the lodge under the stars. Usually the chatter was animated with stories of the day and wildlife stories from previous bush trips. On the first evening, we finished supper around 22h30 and collected our camera gear to go out to do some night photography. 

This was the first time I had done light painting at night. It was a trial and error process to get the right amount of light on the rock formation. We would start with an ISO of 1000, aperture of f22 and 30 second shutter speed. I was absolutely intrigued by the sensitivity of the camera’s sensor. It could pick up many more stars than we could see, and no they were not blown pixels.

The next image is of the sandstone arch just off the road leading to the lodge. The image was shot facing south so we picked up some of the orange light from Ceres.

The trial and error process dictates that it is a time-consuming process to get the right amount of light on the sandstone arch. We did not have enough time to attempt star trails.

One thing about night photography is that you have to really know your way around your camera in the pitch dark. It is important to set up key functions in ‘My Menu” for easy access in the dark, such as the virtual horizon.

I will post another set of images next week showing the High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques and panoramas.

A big thank you to the CNP team – Lou Coetzer, Veronica Coetzer, Henri Coetzer and Neal Cooper. You taught me a lot of new techniques and I gained a new, deeper appreciation for composition and the incredible power of my Nikon D800. I now have enough knowledge and confidence to try these techniques on my own. I will definitely try some of these techniques on my Chobe trip in March 2014.

The images in this post are my first attempts at formal landscape photography- That compelling quality will come with practice and insight. 

“Anyone can take a picture of a tree; because it is in front of the camera. It takes an artist to use the image of the tree to show you something else about the tree, or something else entirely that has nothing to do with the tree per se. Since the visually impaired photographer has difficulty seeing the tree – indeed, the blind photographer does not see the tree at all – other associations and meanings must necessarily arise that, ultimately, result in some inner train of thought/intuition that concludes with the photographer making the camera go click.

Andy Ilachinski

Tao of Photography

Have fun – still learning to see!!

Mike