Tag Archives: photos

Himalayan Tahrs on Table Mountain again

During the 1930s some Himalayan Tahrs escaped from the Groote Schuur zoo near UCT. They bolted onto the mountain and lived happily up there for the next 70 years.

In 2004 SANParks controversially decided to cull them because they are an alien species and were causing damage to the indigenous species. I agreed with that decision.

But, I can tell you for a fact that they didn’t get all of them.

Yesterday afternoon I saw three tahrs grazing right next to the path on Platteklip Gorge. They were right above the site where I saw someone jump to his death exactly 2 weeks ago.

I was able to walk really close to them and they just looked at me. They’ve obviously forgotten about the culling almost 6 years ago!

Photos of diving under the Antarctic ice

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Norbert Wu has spent a lot of time diving under the ice of Antarctica. Very dangerous, very interesting.

Despite the extreme cold, life is relatively abundant and he has some great photos.

Click through to the gallery for more pictures and explanations. Here are some of the best images.

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Here a diver is swimming below a crack in the sea ice.

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Starfish can be quite vicious. In this case they are slowly devouring a dead seal pup.

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In Antarctica you don’t just dig a hole in the ice and start diving. They maintain ‘dive huts’ from which they dive in water as cold as -1.8 Centigrade.

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Great idea – a portal and tube have been built to allow researchers to observe what is going on underwater.

antarctic-diving-window

Ninja bugs

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National Geographic has a photo gallery showing off some of nature’s clever disguises. Well worth a look.

There are two bugs in this picture. Seriously.

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“Leaf knockoffs down to brown spots and notched edges, two Mimetica katydids with twiglike legs can rest or feed without drawing attention”.

In case you’re still not sure, here they are:

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The gallery is well worth looking at. Below are a few more of by favorites.

Not a snake…

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Finally, this is a great mantis. Nature is awesome.

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Amazing photo of kingfisher diving

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These are some stunning photos of a kingfisher feeding. At first I only saw the one below (best kingfisher photo I’ve ever seen) and couldn’t figure out how the photographer got it right.

Underwater shot of a Kingisher catching a fish

I managed to find the source page (check it out for high-res photos). It has some more stunning pictures which offer hints as to how the photographer could get the first shot.

Kingfisher diving towards a hole in the ice

Kingfisher emerging from a hole in the ice with a good catch

National Geographic’s Infinite Photo

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National Geographic have put together this cool “infinite photograph”. They’ve used hundreds of user submitted photos to create an infinitely zoomable photo mosaic.

To see what I mean let’s go through an example. You start off with this image. Use the yellow border to choose an area to zoom into:

Example from National Geographic's Infinite Photo

The app will zoom in to show the selected area made up of hundreds of small photos:

Example from National Geographic's Infinite Photo

You can carry on zooming in forever. Eventually you’ll zoom in to a single image and the whole process starts again – hence the infinite…

Example from National Geographic's Infinite Photo

National Geographic visions of the Earth

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Each edition of National Geographic Magazine has a section called Visions of the Earth – basically a collection of great photos from around the world.

I was looking over some of the older ones and was blown away by some of them. Here are a handful of the best.

This one was taken with the lens half submerged. If it wasn’t from National Geographic I wouldn’t believe it was real. I’m still skeptical…
National Geographic picture of a fisherman

This is one of the best photos I’ve seen. I had to read the explanation to understand what was going on. It’s taken near sunset in the deserts of South Africa. There is a massive sand dune rising in the sunlight in the background.
dunes

Alligator claw. Awesome.

There are many other excellent pictures, but I restricted this post to three that I really liked.

Photos from restricted areas

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Wired has this photo gallery from a new book called An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. The photographer gets access to areas not normally open to the public and gets some interesting photos. Two that I liked are shown below.

These are “stainless-steel nuclear waste capsules” in a pool of water. There are almost 2000 capsules at this site in Washington State and the blue light is a kind of radiation.

And this is an “avian quarantine facility” in New York. All imported birds must be kept here for 30 days in order to prevent bird flu from getting into the country.