Check out What the Duck. It’s a hilarious comic strip centered around a duck photographer. After the hundreds I’ve read, this is still my favorite.

Here’s one of the ones that I ended up liking a lot. It was a cloudy, rainy Friday last week and I decided to take a bit of a walk-about during my lunch hour. I headed down to the Chattahoochee River, which runs through downtown Columbus and just happens to be a few blocks from my office.

I ventured out onto the rocks just below one of the mill dams and saw this Heron hanging out near the falls. Trying not to spook him, my goal was to use a slow enough shutter speed to show movement of the water, but also keep it fast enough so it would freeze the Heron. It’s not the most crisp image of a Heron that you’ll find, but overall I think it works.

Once shot, I did a little post-processing in Lightroom 2 to make the bird “pop” a little from the white background.

This last shot is one of my recent favorites.

We had a phenomenal time while we were there.  As you can see from the previous posts, we visited a few game reserves, hiked around Hogsback and then Sunette's sister got married the Saturday before we left.  I'll post some pictures from the wedding below.  Keep in mind, I wasn't the hired photographer so I was going after the shots that he wasn't there to take.   

It was a lovely outdoor wedding; a beautiful bride and handsome groom, perfect setting, perfect weather and a hopping dinner and reception.  Sunette and I took ballroom dancing lessons to prepare since the new husband and wife are phenomenal ballroom dancers.  Needless to say the DJ didn't quite play the same kind of music that we had practiced to.  So can you guess which person at the dinner decided to break the ice a bit by providing a firm demonstration of the Tootsie Roll.  Yeah, being the only American there, I had to represent.  Needless to say the party and the dance floor loosened up a bit after that.

All in all, it was a fantastic time.  I pictured it being essentially a photo expedition and that's exactly what it was, from capturing nature and animals to weddings and receptions.  I definitely learned a few tricks and I feel like I got some great images from the trip.

Can I say that we missed Elliot something fierce?  Luckily we were able to video Skype with him while we were there, which made it much easier to be away for so long.  Now we're back home as one big ol' happy family.  I'm sure the routine is just around the corner, but we'll see if we can fend it off for a few more days at least. 

We've had a great last few days, going on a nice long hike yesterday and having a lazy day today.  I've taken a few decent shots in the past couple of days, but they'll have to wait 'til tomorrow or the next day to post.  It's been a little chilly these last few days, about 50 degrees or so during the day.  Tonight we're huddled up around a fire, reading, drinking coffee and eating Brandy Tart.  Mmmmmmmm.  Needless to say, I didn't lose any weight on this trip for sure. 

As promised, here are some shots from Sunday in Addo Elephant Park.  I'll continue to post shots I've taken over the last few days, but my internet access may be limited a bit.  We'll see. 

All of these shots are from when we stumbled on a herd of about 40 elephants at a watering hole late Sunday afternoon.  We sat and watched them for almost 2 hours.  That's a lot of elephants.

Edit:  My blogging software, MarsEdit, is driving me a little batty.  It's screwing with my categories and not posting the pics correctly.  Hmmmm….

Double Drift is a game reserve covering over 57,000 acres located about an hour from Hogsback, SA, just south of Alice, SA. They have rhinos, a few elephants, zebra, giraffe and tons more. We’ve been there once before and had a nice experience, seeing rhino and a bunch of other things. This time we went down on Friday afternoon with Sunette’s parents and two other friends. It was a little slow on the sightings, but we did run across this big guy.

After we made one drive, then headed over to some little cottages inside the park overlooking the Great Fish River. The cottages were great and we had a fantastic braai (grill-out) that night under the stars.

The next morning Sunette and I got up before the dawn to make one more drive, then head to Addo. Of course, being in the bush you’re more than likely to run into a few neighbors. This guy was waiting for me under the suitcase as we were getting ready to leave.

We ushered him out of course and continued on with the drive. As the sun was coming up there were some gorgeous settings for a couple tree shots. I’m trying to get shots of all the different trees that we’ll do a collection of at the house maybe. Here’s a silhouette of a Kiepersol Tree and a Thorn Tree. Those things look mean, and they’re all over the place.

The drive through the reserve that morning was gorgeous. We didn’t see a bunch of animals unfortunately but the Aloes were blooming and made for some nice shots.

We did catch a couple zebra checking us out.

From Double Drift we headed to Addo. Tomorrow I’ll post shots and a description of Addo Elephant Park.

Tomorrow we head to Double Drift game reserve to see if we can spy some animals. Then we head to Addo elephant park on Saturday and Sunday to do the same. Hopefully I'll be able to post some nice game pics in the next day or so.
Oh and for everyone back home…how's work?

Here are a few photos that I’ve taken recently that I haven’t posted. Of course, you can always check out my Flickr if you just can’t get enough.

The last photo I took this afternoon and quickly realized I made a rookie mistake. I didn’t even look at my ISO settings as I was snapping away. Come to find out, I had manually set the ISO to 1600 on a previous few photos and it completely introduced too much noise into the photos. Oh well, I’ll reshoot ‘em tomorrow.

After breakfast we were trying to figure out where to go shoot when I decided to ride him by Golden’s Foundry. Our buddy John works there, his family has owned it for generations, and he just happened to be working on Saturday.  I rang him up and within 5 minutes we were starting "the tour".  Sweet!

Below are some of the shots that I was pleased with.  It was a little tougher assignment since we couldn’t camp out and tweak settings.  We were basically snapping while we walked.  Which makes it tough in a dark environment.  It would’ve been great to setup the tripod and get some really nice, crisp images, but that wasn’t an option at the time.  I had to jack up my ISO, slow the shutter speed and hope I held the camera still.  Still it was fun.