All at Sea

I have to admit i made a big mistake when i was putting together my eclipse in Ghana series (see the posts below, for 29-mar-2006). I got the latitude and longitude confused so i was all at sea way south of Ghana. Sorry folks I've fixed the references now.

If you haven't tried out using Flyr (a special search for geotagged photos on Flickr) its well worth the effort. If you don't have google earth, (which is free to download but it does really need broadband access to the internet to fully appreciate) then use the google map link instead.

This link shows you all my geotagged photos.

Eclipse watchers

I love this set, showing the joy of these eclipse watchers. (all sharing the only one pair of special viewing glasses)

Reflection of the eclipse

During the eclipse I figured pointing at the sun, without a special filter, would just give me lens flare, and it did!

BUT look down at the reflection diagonally to the left and down. Its the moon covering the sun in the fairly normal position for the bright dots of light that accompany lens flare. It is however a nice sharp reflection of the eclipse, as the moon partially covers the sun (I have no idea how I managed to capture this)

[geotagged geo:lat=7.052558° geo:lon=-2.23201°]


See also my Eclipse in Ghana PhotSet on flickr

The birds

One interesting aspect of the darkness generated by the eclipse, was noticed by the birds before I did. Normally birds can be seen flying all over the newly mined open pits. Suddenly during the period of darkness the birds appeared to vanish no where to be seen in the air, they had gone to ground.



See also my Eclipse in Ghana PhotSet on flickr

Dimming the Lights

Today's big event, photographically speaking, was an eclipse. Whilst it was a total eclipse at Accra, it was only a very quick partial eclipse here at Kenyasi, a bit of a non event. I had planned to go to a spot and take photos at regular intervals but the wonders of my camera's own light meter (it strives very hard to get all shots exposed perfectly, and the same!) and fairly small changes in lighting anyway, conspired to make the differences very subtle.

If you care to move your mouse across the images, you will see the time they were taken. The period 9:10 to 9;12 was darker, and thats about all that was noticeable on the ground.


[geotagged geo:lat=7.052558° geo:lon=-2.23201°]


See also my Eclipse in Ghana PhotSet on flickr

Seeing Red

In Africa you can buy just about anything by the roadside. Some of the produce is both cheap and very fresh, these chillis are also.......

A road less travelled

Each day i travel along the old Kenyasi to Ntotoroso Road, passing through some relatively undisturbed forrest, some old cocoa farms, the occassional splashes of red from the flame trees and lots of elephant grass.

Taking photos isn't easy, because the light is low and the windscreen usually wet and splatter with mud, yet the moody silhouettes of the trees are well worth the attempts to take a few shoots. I use multi-shoot mode to make sure that I can minimise the time delay between shoots, things happen fast when photographying from a vehicle, even when you are seldom travelling faster than 50kmh.

Soon to be Smooth

for photofriday topic :Smooth

Photobucket revisted

I often find myself way out on the tenuous end of a low bandwidth part of the net where FTP uploads are unknown and any that sounds large (eg a photo) is forbidden,

So how to keep posting to the net?

I have in the recent past used the email to flickr feature that will also then forward your email and image as a blog post. Alas this email to flickr seems to be down at the moment, not even loading the photo into my flickr photostream.

Plan B, in the past I used Photobucket because it allows an old fashion browse and upload, multi-ple uploads even. It also gives you a variety of prewritten tags & HTML snippets to cut and paste into your blog or forum boards. This can save a lot of tedium. When I logged in this time I discovered photobucket now has its own blog post feature, which is nice and easy to use (even in low bandwidth locations it didn't time out).

The post below was sent in using it. The only downside was the default HTML makes the image too wide for my blog page (i had to edit in a width= argumenet to the html) AND it doesn't set up a click through link to a higher resolution image. One feature I think is pretty much a necessity for a photo bog! So is you want to see the larger version of that photo below click here

Oh and I forgot to say the basic sign up for photobucket is free, so there are banner ads. (not those annoying drop down ones, that any traveler will warn you always kill even the best connection in a remote cyber cafe)

Sunrise Ghana Style

The dawn on a dust back road in Ghana can be beautiful and mysterious (as well as dusty)

A 6 panel panorama

The evening storms in western Ghana are a sign that the harmatan winds season, the harsh dusty winds from the sahara, is about to finish.

Normally taking a panaorama were the lighting of the sky changes so dramatically, is so difficult it seldom works. Part of your photo will be based on murky dark images where other photos will be highkey and bleached out. FOr this reason I took my light and focus from between photos 2 & 3 but half pressing the shutter. Then moveing back to the start photo and beginning the series.



Taken at Newmont's Ahafo gold project.

Transportation of Goods (african style)

Almost everything consumed in traditional daily life is "hand" carried in africa, and the task is almost exclusively "shouldered" by women.

Why is it so?

I have for a long time thought that landscapes (and beachscapes) require a longer wider format. Heck the new digital TVs and my notebook computer even use this wider format now. Yet printer manufactuers and photofinishers are still focussed on a few paper sizes.

Markings on the sand

Capturing a glimpse

Strongly backlit subjects are a nightmare for digital cameras, and this lighting only lasted for seconds as the sun set, so i had to act fast. My Phone camera proved useless, largely because the exposure it selected, it tries to always average the readong but left dark silohettes around the lens flare. Ok I was expecting a bit much!

I hurriedly pulled my trusty olympus camera from my camera bag, turned off the autoflash and swapped to matrix metering mode.

Do you want to play?

Silver afternoon