More Pictures uploaded...

Today I worked on pictures taken at the Royal Natal National Park in the Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, at the new year of 2002. They have been uploaded to Webshots.com. Some of the most beautiful mountains I have seen, and I have seen a LOT of beautiful mountain ranges.

After that I worked on pictures taken when we had a short vacation at the Barra Lodge, Inhambane, Mozambique. Probably the nicest beach that I have ever enjoyed, and I have a LOT of experience of nice beaches all around the world! Chrystal clear warm water, almost white sand, and no crowds...

http://community.webshots.com/user/tommy_javerfalk?vhost=community

They are also available in a different format on my home page

www.swesar.com

Lots of Pictures...

The last few days I've been doing a lot of work with pictures that are in my archive on the PC. Some have been published on Webshots.com and others on my own website.

I found a nice picture on my daughter's blog, and played around a bit with it in Photoshop. Always a lot of fun!

My latest album on Webshots features a lot of flowers in our garden. The second latest is more KNP pictures.

My plans are to also make an album with pics from Inhamane in Mozambique, and from The Drakensberg in KZN.




Enjoy! All comments are welcome...

Kruger National Park

This should be a link to some more pictures from the Game Reserve that I uploaded to Webshots.com
The slideshow is not that great, rather use the link below to the original site.



Kruger National Park #2

Special Request...

The most cuddly dog in the world... Rufus!!!


I took this picture today specially for my daughter Anneli, who fell in love with Rufus while visiting me in South Africa a year ago.

Flower Close-ups

Some more close-up pictures of flowers in our garden...


Our hibiscuses blossom almost around the year. We have seven hibiscuses of different color. Two of them double, the rest single flower.


Double-click for Hi-Res...

Computer Art Flowers...

Flowers have become a very important part of my life. I was never really interested in gardening, perhaps because of the difficulties with the climate in Sweden. But it's different here! Lots of flowering plants, even trees, although it's winter. I like to take photographs of nice flowers, and sometimes I play around a bit with the pics on my PC. This first pic is an aloe that many people have in their gardens, but it also grows wild.



When running the picture trough Photoshop, using some filters and tricks, the result can be like this:

This picture is part of a photograph of a Hibiscus flower in our garden. I just deleted everything but the petals, and manipulated the colors a bit.

This Strelitzia picture was also taken in our garden. It is really a photograph, but it has been heavily manipulated to make it look as a water color painting. I think I succeeded quite well with this one!
All the pictures are clickable to view them in hi-resolution.

Kruger National Park

We stayed at Skukuza Camp for two nights. Skukuza is situated at the Sabie River and is the main camp of the KNP. It also is the center for the research and the vet services.
The Sabie River in the morning sunlight.

Almost the same location at sunset.

One of the nicest spottings were these 21 elephants at a water hole. The baby elephants are so cute! They drank a lot of water, but when the matriarch had enough, they all followed her, and in a couple of minutes all of them were gone.
We saw just two lions, a male and a lioness. I can not publish the lion pornography pictures without their consent!

Zebras have always been one of my favourite animals in photographs. Three nice butts, so similar, but yet unique!

One of the most spectacular views we saw was a herd of 1000+ zebras. Zebras just about 20 meters from us, and all the way to the horizon!

My favourite antelope is the Kudu. This bull in a nice setting was really posing for us!

This Iguana was more than 1½ meter long!

Kruger National Park

Today we came back from a trip to the Kruger National Park, or "the Game Reserve" as we usually call it. Staying for two nights at Skukuza Camp, we had a lovely time. The ADSL has been quite bad during the afternoon, so I will probably have to make some more posts tomorrow.
As usual we saw a lot of nice animals, and I used my new super-nice Canon lens!

Hiking in winter

The Uitsoek Hiking Trail Camp.

We are back from a weekend (2 nights) hike in the escarpment. It's a wonderful experience to hike in South Africa in the winter. Quite cold during the night, but one or two hours after sunrise it's very nice and warm, this weekend around +25!







The hike we made in March happened to coincide with the warmest day at that time of year in this part of Africa in many decades, with mid-day temperature of +40! But this time it was just VERY nice...










We left on Friday afternoon, and arrived at the Uitsoek Hut, about 50 km from Nelspruit, just before sunset. We had a very nice braai in the evening, that Garrit, my brother-in-law, and Marie arranged with all their expertise.



































After a good night's sleep in our sleeping bags in the hut we were ready for the first hike on Saturday morning. I took some nice pictures of the view from the hut.
The trail is about 11 km long, and it has a rating of "Moderately Difficult", which is probably about 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. Our destination was the Bakkraans Waterfall. The whole hike took about 6 hours! It's definately not as walking on a sidewalk in town... You have to watch every step. But there is also very much to look at... nice flowers, beautiful trees, and even some monkeys...






In the evening we had a nice lamb curry that Robert and Annelie cooked on an open fire. Everybody went to bed quite early and slept for 10-11 hours!
In the morning it was time for a big breakfast that me and Leona cooked. Lots of stirfried veggies, and bacon and scrambled eggs.
After that it was time for the second trail. And then return to Nelspruit... A fantastic weekend! All the nice flowers... not a single mosquito... not even a snake... just one spider, a couple of monkeys and lots of nice birds!
To hike here in winter... wearing nothing but shorts and a short-sleeved shirt/T-shirt, is really wonderful.






Protea flowers



















































Aloe flowers

Old photos

While packing some books, maps and other stuff that I wanted to ship (by air!) to South Africa, I found a lot of old pictures.
These two are views from Elvaberget i Malå, Västerbotten, Sweden, where we stayed from 1974 to 1976.

A New Photographic Experience....

On my last trip from Sweden to South Africa I brought my Leicaflex camera that I bought in 1969. It is an SLR 35mm camera, with built-in exposure meter (the first camera with a spot meter). I haven't used it for years, but with 3 extremely nice lenses, 35/90/180 mm, all at F2,8 which was quite extreme at the time I bought them, and some other gadgets as well, why should I get rid of it? It may soon be a collectors item...
Last week I loaded it with an 35mm film for prints just to check if it still works. I also used the rings between the lens and the camera body for close-ups. I don't have that gadget for my more recent cameras. And then I used a tripod and quickly took the 36 pics of flowers in our garden. I had the film developed, but not printed, because I wanted to scan it myself. But then I couldn't find the film holder for my scanner, so yesterday I handed it in for prints, but they told me that they can scan it to a CD for just R30, which was a nice bargain.
We were at the Riverside Mall for 4 hours yesterday! I had to buy some new clothes, and some other stuff. We had a nice lunch at the Jazz Cafe.
When at home I was very curious to see the pics... It is not always easy to make the extreme close-ups. A tripod is absolutely necessary, but even on a tripod, there can be a slight movement when you push the button for exposure, bringing the focus to some other point than you actually planned.
The combination of the film scanned and Photoshop is very nice!!! Here are some samples:



Today it is raining here... always nice with rain!!! The garden needs it, and the water reservoirs as well. It is not often that we have rain during the winter months.