Recent photos

Recent adventures in point-and-shoot photography...

I tend to forget to put up photos here. But they are all available in my DeviantArt galleries here:

https://brianvds.deviantart.com/gallery/

Fell free to use them for whatever purpose, no strings attached. Crediting me would of course be the polite thing to do.

A few photos

I now and then indulge in pseudo-artsy photography with my humble point-and-shoot camera. Some of the latest ones:

The aloes are in bloom at the moment; makes for an attractive sight in our otherwise rather monotone winters:

There are nevertheless signs of spring in the air. These peach blossoms reminded me of Van Gogh's famous painting of the same subject:

Around here, because of a rather high rate of crime, people tend to live behind high walls and ugly electric fences. Thus, the only way to take a nice photo is to tilt the camera up a bit:

Pyramid tree

Pyramid tree, Lagunaria patersonia.

Some recent photos

My latest adventures in point-and-shoot photography...

Cats and Containers

I now and then indulge in photography. My humble point-and-shoot puts limitations on what I can achieve (not to mention my even more humble talents), but it's fun and often useful for reference.

Anthotypes

I have been trying my hand at making anthotypes - basically making prints using photosensitive chemicals from plants. An description of what it entails can be read in Wikipedia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthotype

And here are two articles describing how to do it in some detail:

http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/anthotypes/anthotype-process

http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/anthotypes/anthotypes-making-print-using-plants

For my first attempt, I used the purple berries of a privet bush (Ligustrum sp.). I mashed up a handful with a mortar and pestle, added a bit of water and methylated spirits to create a thin, watery paint (because the pulp was rather too dry to brush on its own) and then brushed two or three layers onto cartridge paper (letting layers dry before brushing on the next one). When the liquid dried it turned brownish.

I then put the paper onto a piece of Masonite, put a few leaves from a carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua) on top, and then covered it with a plastic transparency, and fastened the whole thing together with clips:

As you can see, the transparency did not work very well: instead of pressing the leaves flat against the paper, it buckled a bit, allowing sunshine to get partly under the leaves. I left the setup out in the sun for about five days, after which a clear print had formed on the paper:

It looks rather out of focus for reasons explained above: the leaves did not press down firmly onto the paper, so as the sun shifted position through the days, its rays got in under the sides of the leaves, exposing bits of paper that should have remained in shade.

For my next attempt I got hold of a piece of plate glass, and I used three layers of cheap red wine as photosensitive pigment. For the rest I simply repeated the procedure as above:

As you can see, the leaves were pressed down more firmly against the paper this time. I used carob leaves again, plus a few leaves from a garden shrub I can't identify. I once again left it in sunshine for about five days. This time round, the print came out more crisply and clearly:

Perhaps not exactly great art or photography, but there is something rather magical about it.

A homemade rainbow

It has been a while since I have had time to post anything here. Well, rather late than never. Here is a photo of the sun's light falling through water in a wine glass and in the process being broken up into a spectrum of its constituent wavelengths:

And here is a closeup of a part of the rainbow:

Finally, a photo of a "real" rainbow I took some weeks ago:

My simple point-and-shoot camera is not the best tool with which to capture the rich colours. All seven, er, six, er... how many colours are there in a rainbow anyway? At school, we are usually taught that there are seven. Precisely seven, no more and no less, and the clever kids, none of whom have ever taken the time to look - really look - at a rainbow, can even name them for you: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Or something like that. I can never quite remember, and I don't think I have ever seen more than six clearly defined colours in a rainbow. Because the colours smoothly flow into one another, one can perhaps see more than seven. Or, depending on your culture and language, fewer than six.

Next time you see a rainbow, take note of how many colours you see. You may be surprised.

Edit, 24/12/2011:
There is a good article in Wikipedia about rainbows, that explains quite a lot about them, here.

Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary

A nice place to kill a few hours is the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary in Pretoria, where a large enclosure is home to all manner of critters, such as this steenbok:

As one might expect, there is also a large variety of birds, especially waterbirds, such as comb ducks (a.k.a. knob-billed ducks, for obvious reasons):

Blacksmith lapwing (so named because of its call, which resembles a small hammer hitting an anvil):

 Little egret:

 And the ubiquitous Egyptian goose:

Also commonly found at the reserve is the white-faced duck:

and yellow-billed duck:

It is a congenial place to make sketches of birds, something I try now and then when I can work up the courage to try sketching moving targets.

Winter

I almost never have time to attend to this blog thing anymore. But here's a photo I took from my porch before sunrise this morning. Unfortunately came out a bit fuzzy and out of focus because of the low light. But one can still see the frost covering the fields in the distance. Winter is definitely here.