Jennifer Sawicky Photography

The photo challenge this week was to show something, or someone, sweet. If that isn’t an invitation to share photos of elephants, I don’t know what is. Or maybe that’s just me. 🙂 So here are a few images featuring some adorable baby elephants seen last year on my trip through Southern Africa.

Enjoy!

20180220_WPCSweet_JSawicky1 — This little one was struggling to climb out of the river bed, and got a helpful push from Mom. Hoanib Camp, Namibia. April 2017.

20180220_WPCSweet_JSawicky2 — Partially hidden behind Mom, this little elephant was very curious about our group. Botswana, May 2017.

20180220_WPCSweet_JSawicky3 — Another inquisitive youngster seen in the Okavango Delta. This one was busy watching a nearby group of baboons. Botswana, May 2017.

WPC: Sweet

February 19, 2018February 19, 2018

2018-02-19: Monochrome Monday

A pair of impala rams face off during rutting season. This time of year makes the males especially vulnerable to predators, as their minds are occupied with matters other than their own safety.

February 19, 2018February 20, 2018

2018-02-19: Revisiting Old Work

Before I get into today’s post, I wanted to say sorry for the lack of activity over the past week. I made the plunge to move to a new self-hosted website so I could combine my blog and gallery (something I have wanted to do for over a year now). And while the internet does make everything appear to be instantaneous, moving 4+ years of blog posts, migrating a domain to a new hosting provider and setting everything up just takes time. Especially when you aren’t a web professional! My gallery is very much a work in progress, but the blog is up and running as usual, and fingers crossed my followers have been migrated over properly so someone, besides my Mom, has the chance to read this 🙂

I was hoping to get this posted yesterday, but the Happiness Engineers at WordPress just finished with the behind the scenes work to get my followers transferred to the new site. So this post is better late than never.

Given all the behind the scenes work I have been doing, I am really glad I didn’t choose a topic that required me to get out shooting this week.

The photos below don’t have much rhyme or reason, other than they caught my eye when scrolling through my picture folders with the thought that I might be able to make something a bit better out of it now than I could when I shot it.

I hope you enjoy today’s selections, once I get the gallery up and running, I’ll post a note about that and start looking for some feedback on the redesign.

The steely gaze of a vulture perched on a dead tree. I didn’t do much to this; a little cropping, and a bit of work to bring out the texture in the feathers. April, 2013.

If you are in South Africa in November, when the leatherback turtles begin nesting, I would highly recommend the experience of going out to try to see them. It is such an epic experience; but not the best for photography, especially in the rain. The shots I captured were more proof that I was there then anything, and I really didn’t try editing them originally. Here I didn’t do much other than try to bring some of the texture back to the sand and correct the strange colour cast caused by red-lamp flashlights plus camera flash. For a sense of scale, this turtle is basically the size of a VW Bug; it weighed approx. 600 kilos.

Kalahari the cheetah climbing a hill under a dreary late afternoon sky. I loved the vantage point of the images I shot at this time, but the harsh light made them a challenge to work with. October, 2014.

For the then and now section this week, I chose this image of the Sand River at sunrise captured in 2013 on my first journey to Africa. I actually quite like the original edit that I did, so I tried to interpret it in a bit of a different way, focusing on the warmth and the fog on the updated edit.

Sunrise on the Sand River – original edit.

Sunrise on the Sand Rover – updated edit.

February 11, 2018

2018-02-11: Revisiting Old Work

Another week, and another trip down memory lane in terms of my photography. I’m really glad I made the decision to work on images already captured for this month, as we got rather buried in the snow the past week, and I haven’t had the time, or the energy, to get out and try and capture anything new.

This week is a mixed bag of images, shot locally and in Africa, in colour and black and white.

20180211_Revisit_JSawicky0 — From 2014, a sunrise image of the Golden Ears from the dikes in Pitt Meadows where I used to walk my dog.

20180211_Revisit_JSawicky1 — Flying over Victoria Falls on the way into Livingstone airport in Zambia. Previously, I wasn’t really able to pull out any decent texture from photos shot through windows. Zambia, April 2013.

20180211_Revisit_JSawicky2 — Victoria Falls from the Zambian side. I was very fortunate to see it with just the right water level; enough so the falls looked incredibly impressive, but not so much that it was completely shrouded in mist. Zambia, April 2013.

For my then and now image, I chose this zebra from my first trip to South Africa. The original black and white conversion was done in Lightroom using a few basic adjustments, not long after I returned from my trip. The updated image was edited recently using a combination of plugins in Photoshop, including MacPhun Tonality and Topaz Detail. I’m sure I could achieve similar results simply using On1 Photo Raw (I’m not using Lightroom any longer for processing), but I like the ease of using Tonality for black and white edits.

Zebra original.jpg — Then – a basic black and white conversion lacking a lot of contrast.

20180211_Revisit_JSawicky0 copy — Now – the zebra stands out much better against the foliage, and there is a lot more detail throughout the image.

Please visit:
www.jennifersawickyphotography.com for wildlife, landscape and nature inspired artwork.

and

https://shopvida.com/collections/jennifer-sawicky for textiles inspired by my photography.

February 7, 2018

2018-02-07: Wordless Wednesday

20180207_WW

February 5, 2018

2018-02-05: Monochrome Monday

I truly have been blessed with the leopard sightings I have experienced over the years.

A leopard silhouetted by the setting sun in the Okavango Delta, Botswana.

Please visit:
www.jennifersawickyphotography.com for wildlife, landscape and nature inspired artwork.

and

https://shopvida.com/collections/jennifer-sawicky for textiles inspired by my photography.

February 4, 2018

2018-02-04: Revisiting old work

For February, I have decided that my topic for the month will be revisiting old work. It was one of the shortlisted topic ideas that I had come up with back in December, and lately, it is a concept I have been encountering over and over in the educational resources I am working through, in articles that I read and podcasts that I have been listening to. I think it is an excellent concept as there have been improvements in photo editing software over the years, plus I’ve added a lot more tools into my editing toolbox and my skills at editing have improved with time and practice.

I am going to try to look for a mix of images that I can show both a then and now edited version of an image, and also work on images for the first time. I am sure there are many images that I passed over throughout the years because I simply didn’t have the skills to correct for errors in the field, difficult lighting scenarios or heavy noise.

Here is my first instalment of revisiting old work:

20180204_Revisit_JSawicky0 — I originally edited this giraffe image upon returning home from a trip in 2014. below is my revisit to the image.

20180204_Revisit_JSawicky1 — Today’s take on the same image; the changes are not dramatic, but textures in the images are definitely a lot more apparent.

20180204_Revisit_JSawicky2 — I love the surreal nature of this deer at sunrise in thick fog. Taken along to Pitt River October, 2013.

20180204_Revisit_JSawicky3 — Way back to the first trip where I had a DSLR camera, a Nikon D5100 with kits lens. I was on a Caribbean cruise and spent loads of time shooting images off the balcony, but never edited any of them till much later. January, 2012.

20180204_Revisit_JSawicky4 — Wild horses on Grand Turk, January 2012. This was a shore excursion on the same trip as the image above. I took a short walk from the main tourist area along the beach and found these two horses grazing. It felt like a rather improbable sighting at the time, but during my travels I have come to learn that many animals can survive quite well in areas that seem to have rather meaner resources.

It’s been fun rooting through my photo catalogues for old images to work on. Pop by next Sunday to see what else I turn up.

Please visit:
www.jennifersawickyphotography.com for wildlife, landscape and nature inspired artwork.

and

https://shopvida.com/collections/jennifer-sawicky for textiles inspired by my photography.

February 1, 2018

2018-02-01: WPC – Beloved

I could have gone two ways with a topic of Beloved for the photo challenge of the week. And since I try my best not to post photos of my dog all the time, I went with my most beloved animal of the African bush, the elephant. Now, anyone who has followed my blog for a while knows that I love elephants, so this should come as no surprise. They are my favourite animal to spend time with (besides my dog, of course!).

I selected the images below because they represent all ages and a variety of different habitats that elephants make their homes in. I hope you enjoy.