Month: April 2007
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Lions of South Africa
Amongst the big five (the prefered game of safari hunters in the 19th and 20th centuries), there is -of course- the mighty lion. I did not kill any, but I shot several images: Lion cub Lionness(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)
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Review of Sigma 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG OS
Most wildlife photo amateurs are very found of long focal length tele-lenses. Quite often, the ideal is to be able to go up to 400mm. However, ideally, we should have a zoom to adapt up from a shorter focal length. These last years, the technology evolved so significantly that there is no doubt the 100-400mm…
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Larder in South Africa
If there are so many predators in South Africa, it’s because many big grass-eating ruminant mammals are present too. They are the walking larder of big cats and other canines. Impala (male, jumping) Gnus Nyala antelope (male) Kudu (female) Kudu (female) Cobb(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)
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Happy birthday Hubble!
The Hubble space telescope just went through its 17th birthday. Unfortunately, its future seems to be pretty much compromised since the Moon and Mars ambitions of the President of the United States of America forced NASA to reduce drastically the number of space shuttle missions: There will probably never be any other repair mission to…
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Dumb hunters kill one out of seven last females of Amur Leopards
The WWF announced that hunters in Eastern Russia recently killed one female of the critically endangered species of Amur Leopard. The animal was shot and them beaten to death with one blunt object apparently. She was one of the last seven (7) female animals still living of that species. The end is approaching fast for…
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Generators for fully personnalized seals, signs and badges
Ultra-specialized, the web sites below will allow you to build or create easily enormously personnalized images: Clapper board: As if you were clapping for your own motion picture Cigarette pack Warning label 100% tailor-made Official-looking seals
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South Africa: Big birds
South Africa is the country of the big five. But, they also have pretty big birds. Some of them are here. Various vultures (lappet-faced vulture, white-backed vulture, hooded vulture) Lappet-faced Vultures Fishing eagle(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image) If you can help me identify them precisely, I’d appreciate your help in the…
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LightZone, a Linux kind of shareware
Lightzone is a RAW manipulation tool (“Your personal digital darkroom“) that some people like a lot for its specific set of qualities (clean neat interface, support for a lot of RAW file formats, ability to handle batch jobs, end-to-end color management) despite its hefty price tag ($150 for the Basic version and $250 for the…
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Thelonious Monk on video
While looking around in a search engine, you may find a few nice things. Today, I stopped by the quite large list of videos listed on Google search engine for the keywords “Thelonious Monk”. The guy was one of the most inventive jazz players. The first time I heard him, I was nearly rocked off…