Why go looking for animals when they come to you?
Ezulwini Billy's Lodge, greater Kruger park, September 25, afternoon
While I was relaxing at the lodge, possibly writing journal, or more likely dozing while meaning to write journal, one of the staff (Cozzie, I think) drew my attention to the fact that there were baboons in the dry river bed that the lodge overlooks. My camera's auto-focus was intent on getting the foreground vegetation in focus, so my first few pictures were useless. But by then the baboons were climbing into trees where they were more easily visible. It looked like they were there to pick the flowers off a tree to eat them. I'm pretty sure it's a jacaranda tree, just like I have in front of my West Hollywood duplex.
They went back and forth across the riverbed a few times, and eventually I convinced my camera to photograph the baboons instead of the foreground vegetation. Unfortunately, I still had my camera's exposure compensation set wrong, so the pictures were overexposed again. But some should look decent after I run them through Paint Shop Pro.
As it turns out, my video camera battery was in the charger, so I couldn't shoot video that way. But thanks to the woman I met in Saint Lucia (and subsequent experimentation), I knew how to get my Canon 5D Mark II to shoot video - HD video actually. Once I worked out how to brace it so the video wouldn't wobble (since my tripod was in the still-absent luggage), I was able to get some good video of them, plucking flowers and eating them.
After seeing the baboons, I got a bigger surprise: a gray duiker! I had seen a fair number of red duikers on game drives, but they were generally so elusive that any pictures I caught of them were duds. But I'm not sure I had even seen a gray duiker. And while relaxing at the lodge, one of them came to pose for me. What luck!
Further luck was that I finally got my camera's image compensation turned off, so my pictures were no longer deeply overexposed. I don't even remember switching it off, so while writing this I tried an experiment to find out whether using video mode switches it off: I set the exposure compensation, shot a few seconds of video, and switched back to still photography mode. Exposure compensation was still turned on, so apparently I finally put the setting back to normal but forgot I did so. I suppose that's no great surprise; I switched it on (at 12:40 pm) to shoot some pictures of birds back-lit against the sky, and when I was done with the birds (12:47 pm) I forgot to switch it off, and by the time I went to shoot some landscape shots (1:28 pm) I had forgotten that I'd changed the setting.
Anyway, the important thing is that the camera's settings were back to normal, so I could get good pictures of the grey duiker. Not only that, the baboons were still around, so I was also able to get some good pictures of them too. Maybe I don't need to bother trying to bring out detail in the overexposed pictures of them.
Another interesting discovery while I was relaxing at the lodge was that the lodge has Internet - and they don't even charge extra for it. The catch is that their router is in their office, and the signal doesn't reach to the rooms or the lounge, or at least not to my room. But rather than being cut off from the world (except for text messages, since MTN has a fairly good signal around here), I could have been posting all these journal messages that have been piling up on my computer. I'll have to upload them before I leave; I'm sure the place where I'm staying in Cape Town will have Internet too, but I might as well do it here where it's complimentary - and get it done a little sooner.