I love gorillas and I will not apologise for the amount of pics I took. You get 17 of them, most below the fold.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
At the Zoo d’Amnéville 3: Gorillas
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
I love gorillas and I will not apologise for the amount of pics I took. You get 17 of them, most below the fold.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
The little one told us to surprise her with a party for her birthday later this month. I decided to go for a party “Under the Sea” and I want to make a special cake with a “mirror glaze” frosting. Mirror glaze is a special type of frosting which is, you may guess it, very smooth and shiny. Since I’ve never done this before I decided to make a cake for Mr’s birthday last Sunday and try it out, since he can cope with “delicious cake that looks like roadkill”, just in case that things don’t work as they should, but they did.
Actually it turned into two cakes, because I had too much batter for my pan, so he got a galaxy cake with a strawberry cardamom filling and a Ferrero Rocher cake.
Ferrero Rocher cake
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Galaxy cake
©Giliell, all rights reserved
For a “how to”, click below the fold
This week’s video is short but to the point and packed with interesting stuff.
The finalists of the 2018 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are out, and they’re a blast. Here’s a couple of my favourites:
© Achim Sterna/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018
© Mary McGowan/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018
© Roie Galitz/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018
© Kallol Mukherjee/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018
And lots more…
Today’s piece of music is more of a dance showcase, in the theme of colourful animals. Below the fold because spiders.
Soggy leaves, ©voyager, all rights reserved
It’s another damp and dreary day around here and the weather forecast is for more of the same for days ahead. There wasn’t even moody fog today, just dull skies and soggy ground. Even worse, I tripped and dropped my camera and scratched the lens. The camera seems to be working fine, but for the next while my pictures may have a bit of scarring. I’ve been thinking about getting a better lens and perhaps this is the universe’s way of telling me not to wait any longer. In fact, it might just be time for an early Christmas/Festivus present for voyager. I’ll see how bad the damage is over the next few days and if it’s only minor I may try and wait. I think I might need to save a few more pennies to get the quality I want. I’m using a Canon T5i with an EFS 18 – 135mm lens. Any suggestions?
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Zoos aren’t just for “exotic” animals. They are often the favourite spot for the local wildlife as well.
Your friendly neighbourhood corvid
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Obviously inspired by Nightjar. My first experiments with the “flash at dusk” technique. Cropped for composition in PC, because I did not have macro lens with me and I could not zoom as much as I would like.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The trees are doing something odd out in northern Ontario:
In the forests of northern Ontario, a “strange phenomenon” of large natural rings occurs, where thousands of circles, as large as two kilometers in diameter, appear in the remote landscape.
Via this link: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Aerial-photograph-of-forest-rings-with-diameters-of-approximately-150-m-in-northern_fig1_292337890, which leads to a very scientific article on the phenomenon.
The article assures us that this is nothing unnatural or particularly mysterious:
Indeed, as geochemist Stew Hamilton suggested in 1998, the rings are most likely to be surface features caused by “reduced chimneys,” or “big centres of negative charge that frequently occur over metal deposits,” where a forest ring is simply “a special case of a reduced chimney.”
Reduced chimneys, meanwhile, are “giant electrochemical cells” in the ground that, as seen through the example of forest rings, can affect the way vegetation grows there.
I’ve been out there and it looked fine to me, but things get even weirder and weirder the more I read – but that just might be the full article going in all kinds of directions, especially at the end. But the tree rings are cool. And maybe it’s aliens…
The setting for our walk this morning came complete with mood setting mist and the intermittent caws of a murder of crows. Very film noir, so Jack and I pretended we were on the run from the mob and that we had to find a cache left somewhere in the forest for us. We searched high and low with our eyes and our noses and I’m almost certain I heard the crack of a pistol and the swell of violins, but alas! we could not find the cache. My trusted familiar, Jackson Brown, proved his worth yet again, though, leading us safely to the motorcar left for our conveyance to safety.
Deep in the forest, ©voyager, all rights reserved
Our tree this week comes with my apologies. Lofty sent these photos in at the end of July and I misplaced them. Thankfully, they are now on the found list. I’m very glad because the series is beautiful, starting with closeup shots of new growth and shifting the perspective until we finally see the magnificent adult tree.
…a series of shots of a popular beach side tree in our southern city, the Norfolk Island Pine.
Thanks so much for sharing, Lofty.
©Lofty, all rights reserved
It’s the autumn holidays here and we decided to go for one nice family excursion before we’re bogged down in postponed work again. We’d been promising the kids to visit that zoo in France for ages and finally decided to go. I know, for Americans 100km one sounds like your weekly shopping trip, for us it isn’t.
The zoo is in a smallish town near Metz that seems to consist of a thermal fountain, an amusement park, and a giant complex with restaurant, hotels, cinemas, parking and the zoo. The entrance fee is prohibitive, because in France most zoos are private enterprises and not public institutions, but we decided that we can afford it for a special trip, especially since we always bring food and drinks and therefore don’t have to pay the prohibitive prices inside.
To be honest, I don’t regret the money. It was a wonderful day and the zoo is amazing. There are no holidays in France, it was a Monday in October and there were at the most 150 visitors in the whole zoo. I guess in summer the people push you through, but now we had the leisure to enjoy the animals and the shows.
Of course I took a ton of pics. Original count was 2200, after weeding out the really bad ones there are 1300 left. I won’t post them all ;).
First part is the white lions. They are gigantic, at last 30% larger than the “normal” lions in the next enclosure. The couple has some juvenile cubs and as you can see, in the pics, the male was very interested in making some more…
©Giliell, all rights reserved, click for full size.
After his third attempt ended like this he threw himself against the glass of the enclosure…
You have no doubt noticed that some of the later pictures were a bit sloppy in their execution. Keep in mind that they were primarily a learning aide for me and they were not meant to be shared publicly. And whilst I did not post them in the exact order they were made, because they are not physically numbered and I of course do not remember it anymore, they were nevertheless posted in an approximate order. And I do remember that this one I have drawn as the last – and it is also the last one to be posted. This is the finale of the series.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
After this picture I did not need to work on these sheets anymore, because I have passed the anatomy exam and I had to invest my resources into other things.
I knew that I have only 25 sheets to post and I reckoned that posting one a week will be about the right tempo to keep the blog squeak along with some regular and predictable content whilst giving Caine some much-needed respite. And I thought that at the time I will post my last sheet and bow out, she will be convalescing and getting back into her tempo.
Sadly, as it so often happens, the universe does not care about our presumptions and plans. Fuck cancer.