Have been catching up on my blog reading (following a week away from the net in Mexico and the inevitable week of catching up with work and email), and discovered a number of photos over at PhotoSydney that caught my eye:
Friday found most of the folks from Devicescape up at Safari West in Santa Rosa for an African safari in California! The safari was a blast – a drive around the 400 acre preserve in an open safari jeep with a driver who knows about everything you’re going to see. Unlike the more commercial drive-through safari places (such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida), this one stops regularly allowing the occupants to get photos, hear about the animals and ask questions. It also allows the animals check out the vehicle and its occupants (sometimes close up).
The ostrich on the right took a fancy to one of the guys in our jeep, and she repeatedly pulled at his shirt sleeve despite several attempts to discourage her (gently of course). The photo was taken while she was checking out the camera – from about a foot in front of it. We were also examined by a giraffe and watched by the cape buffalo from a few feet away as we passed by.
After lunch, we took a guided walking tour of the aviary and had some more closeup time with the giraffes before heading back to San Francisco.
I have posted a few of the photos I took in Mexico to a new photo gallery. These were all taken at Chichén Itzá – the shot on the right is the El Castillo: the large pyramid in the centre of the site. If you visit the site, and are not afraid of heights at all, you can climb to the temple at the top of the 91 steps.
Other shots in the gallery include photos of the columns in the Plaza of the Thousand Columns (although our guide told us there were only 416 columns), the Temple of the Warriors and some of the stone snake heads that are all over the site.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog and TechDigest are both carrying articles pointing out that the Apple Store now lists the iPod Photo Camera Connector (see Extras under the iPod Accessories section). This makes the whole iPod photo a very interesting proposition since it will be much easier to carry on trips than my PowerBook G4. I hope it can cope with the raw format images from my 20D.
I have plumbers working on my apartment at the moment. They are replacing all the pipes in the whole building, and also fitting new taps, sinks etc (a pretty big job, especially since they have to leave everything in working order at the end of each day). On the first day (last Friday), they came and cut a hole in one of the walls in my hallway, behind the kitchen sink, to reveal the plumbing. Over the weekend, since I had the hole there, I decided to snap a few close-ups of something that is normally hidden away (and has probably been hidden ever since the building was built all those years ago). The white dust you can see in the photo is the only evidence of the hole that they cut in the plasterboard (these guys are so good that they even painted around the edges of the hole to prevent more dust).
Check out Grif’s (relatively) new photoblog. For a long time he has been posting photos mixed in with his other posts to his main blog. Now he has separated the photos out into their own blog, and he manages to post a new shot pretty much every day (which is many more than I manage). I liked today’s one (shown on the right), but that’s probably not a surprise given my own current fascination with macro shots of flowers and other plants.
There’s a rumour going around the internet that claims to be a photo of a cable that would allow an iPod Photo to be connected directly to a digital camera and download the photos from it. That would make the iPod Photo much more interesting. It would be even more interesting if it would work on the less expensive iPods as well (since I don’t need another tiny screen – I just need a pocket sized hard drive).
Thanks to Gizmodo for the heads-up on this one.
I’ve added a number of new sites to the photography section of my links collection over the past few days, including Travis Ruse’s Express Train where the amazing photo on the right came from, Joe’s NYC (mentioned in my previous posting for having my favourite shot of the gates in central park), Overshadowed (formerly in New York, now in Hong Kong), Urban Views, 114th.net and rion.nu.
There are more coming too as I explore the world of photoblogs and bring you my favourites, interleaved with own photos, tech news and general commentary (not much of the latter I promise).
Joe’s NYC (a recent addition to the photography section of my links below) has perhaps my favourite shot of the orange, sorry, saffron gates that have been in central park for the past couple of weeks. The expensive art installation, due to come down this week, has been heavily featured by New York’s photo blogs and media alike, but I think the shot on the right (click to go to the larger version on Joe’s site) is my favourite.
Another place to look for photos of the gates is Dave Beckerman’s blog. In particular, these three days have a number of photos of the gates in them: 2/11, 2/12 and 2/13.
Then there’s Bluejake where there is a very similar shot to Joe’s, just without the snow. Gates photos appeared on these pages: 2/13, 2/15, 2/16, 2/18, 2/21 and 2/22.
Added a few photos taken around the shore line,. and from the bridge, at Lake Merced. Two, including the one to the right, went into the San Francisco gallery; two went into the Flowers and Plants gallery.
The sign on the right was down in the water just off the side of the bridge that cuts the lake into two parts. It was a reminder that the lake is still in a city, and despite an abundance of flowers and other plants all around the shoreline, there are still the tell-tale signs of city life too. At another point around the shore somebody had dumped an old TV down the slope onto some rocks just above the waterline.