Tag Archives: wifi

Remote-control Photography

I got a wifi-enabled camera! My cellphone can now operate the camera remotely! I am going to set it up on a tripod and sit somewhere comfortable and take pictures of unwitting birds. No, man! Feathered ones.

Having this would also have been handy to see what the hyenas and bushpigs were doing outside our hut late at night last time we were in Mfolosi, and I always want to know what’s that snuffling around my tent when camping.

So now I finally have a camera I can set up on a tripod and take pics from my cellphone. Being a cheapskate I waited till I could do it with a cheap camera – a Canon Powershot SX620HS. It’s a tiny little compact camera so I can carry it everywhere, the biggest advantage it has over the cellphone camera is 25X optical zoom.

So now I got the camera aiming at the birdbath waiting for the first exciting shot.

Hmm, getting the camera and phone to talk to each other has taken way longer than I thought. While I was sukkeling, two spectacled weavers, a golden-rumped tinker, an olive sunbird, two brown-hooded kingfishers, a fork-tailed drongo and a speckled mousebird hopped on and grinned at me. Now that I’m rigged up, nothing so far!

Ons sal sien what comes of this! Maybe word got out in the bird world that the binocular pervert who always stares at them while they’re bathing now has a camera? This Red-capped Robin-chat showed what she thought of me at the other birdbath. And this was while I was still shooting from long range!

Once I got the setup going, I soon noticed another small problem: My attention span! This is not really a sport for someone who hops from twig to twig and makes frequent forays to the fridge and/or the kettle. One olive sunbird has been spotted and photographed, small and blurry; moving fast and olive-greenish against an olive-greenish backdrop. Meantime various ostriches and vultures might have taken gulps while my attention was elsewhere. I wouldn’t know.

I can see I need auto-shoot with a movement detector so I can leave it and go to sleep and then see what happened in my absence. And so the drive for ever-more expensive equipment starts!

Other challenges: Battery life! After waiting a few hours the whole setup suddenly switches off: “Re-charge Battery” it commands. And mine only operates with wifi – I’ll need bluetooth to be able to do this in the wild, far from wifi.

So whenever you see a great bird picture, take your hat off to the patience, perseverance, skill and equipment required to get those shots!

I now remember the stories Neville Brickell used to tell me about how he got his bird pics. Something along these lines: He would find a spot where his target bird was likely to be. He would give a big bag of the right seed or feed to someone living nearby and ask them to put a handful out every day for a few weeks. He would set up a hide in a good position and place likely perches with good backgrounds. Later he would return, enter the hide and wait. If all went to plan he would get his picture! His resident feeder would be rewarded for that ultimate success so he had a reason to keep up the feeding. A lot of work and patience! Of course, he also sometimes caught birds and photographed them in cages with controlled light and backgrounds.

~~oo0oo~~

I finally started getting a few fun pics – better anyway than I could get with my little camera from my stoep 30m away. And I could play with the images:

– purple-crested turaco –

and I could zoom in:

Once when I was setting up, this Yellow-rumped Tinkerbird landed a metre away and asked What You Doin’? So I shot him right there, free-hand.

Now that I’ve sold my home and am wandering around, I really need to get going on an alternative system. Fingers crossed. One day . .

Update: I picked Lee Ouzman’s brain and our last thought was Get Another Cellphone and let them talk to each other. So for now I think that’s what I’ll do. I’ll need to mount one on my Manfrotto tripod . . .

~~oo0oo~~

Family Gatherings

Gathering the troops for family meetings used to be hard. You’d no sooner get one to the table than they had disappeared when you got back with the other. Not anymore: For instant family gatherings, with everyone – including Cecilia – crowded round the router with a WTF look on their faces, just switch off the wifi.

~~~oo0oo~~~

Early mornings are not young people’s best. It’s not just Christmas when ‘all through the house; Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;’ I get up in the morning and all is dead quiet. To use another Free State Reed-ism ‘not a leaf stirred, not a dog stirred’ (geddit?*).

They lie low as I pad up and down the passage. Even if I stick my lips at the door crack and ask ‘You Awake?’ not a peep.

Until I walk past with shoes on. Then it’s instantly ‘Where’re you going?’

FOMO.

~~~oo0oo~~~

  • . . not a dog’s turd. This Reed-ism is best orally, not so good in print.

~~~oo0oo~~~

Surviving Off The Grid – The Essentials

So we have no electricity and its getting dark and the kids are all over me, outraged!

Dad! There’s no electricity!

Yes, I say, I can see that.

Why!? they ask.

Uh, mumble mumble, payment mumble, I mumble.

Soon I have to confess: I paid late and we got cut off. Now there’s a re-connection fee I have to pay and a delay. I’m thinking fridge, freezer, supper tonight but they have far more urgent and greater disasters and catastrophes in mind:

“THERE’S NO WIFI!!” they scream in unison.

Now they’re ganging up on me. “In unison” and “Jess & Tom” are not usually linked phrases.

Well, I’m walking to the shops, I say, thinking charcoal, firelighter, matches, candles. Do you need anything? Their voices go up two octaves as they shout as one:

“AIRTIME!!”

=======ooo000ooo=======

Lasted four days. It was cool. Very instructive. Gas cooker and candles. Cleared out the fridge and deep freeze. AND – they survived!

(I had paid on the due date but had ignored this little instruction “Rx is due immediately, the rest can be paid on the due date”).

 

Teenagers!

Pleez pleez Dad! I haven’t seen her for AGES! (yeah, like one week). OK, I’ll fetch her Friday on the way home from work. I enjoy that back route anyway. Instead of taking the N2 national highway then onto the N3 national highway at Spaghetti Junction and home, this route takes me through Yellowwood Park with its dark avenues of huge old yellowwood trees planted around 1885 by Dering Stainbank the sugar baron (don’t take my history at face value, but it’s something like that).

On past the Stainbank nature reserve, over the one-way bridge across the Umhlatuzana River, through the narrow tunnel under the railway line, through the cement factory that Mike Doyle used to run. Up into Bellair past the driveway lined by an avenue of huge palm trees that dwarf the house, past the impressive Albert Luthuli hospital, across the Mkombaan River and into Chesterville at the big shisanyama and beer hall. Andile is waiting outside her home, she hops in and we drive past the Pavilion shopping centre and into Westville and home.

The two girls whoop and give each other a big hello and a hug. Then Andile promptly disappears into the bedroom and Jess into the lounge and they don’t see or speak to each other till suppertime! Of course they may have been busily engaged with each other and a dozen friends on their social media, for all I know. Wifi, after all.

Teenagers!

 

An earlier pic of them one Easter.

Mkhuze Camping

Mkhuze with Jess-collage
– click on pic to see my fiery jackal with a slit throat in the embers –

While I was pitching camp Jess came running to me with a horrified look on her face. She must have seen a snake or a leopard, I’m sure.

“DAD!!” she says breathlessly, horrified, stricken. “DAD!! There’s no wifi here!!”

Her idea of hell.

~~oo0oo~~

Embarrassing note:
I am good at giving advice. If you ask me – actually you don’t even need to ask – I will tell you what the MOST IMPORTANT thing is to take camping.

The FIRST thing you pack when you go camping is a deck chair.

I know this cos my pal Greg Bennett told me back in 1983 on my first Duzi Canoe Marathon. He said “Pete, you can forget everything else but take a deck chair. The most important comfort item you can take is your deck chair,”  he said. I have since pontificated on this very often.

So on this trip to Mkhuze: I forgot the ducking feckchairs.

The girls sat on ammo boxes. I sat on the tailgate. Greg is right: You can’t lean back and snooze on a tailgate.

~~oo0oo~~

And we FINALLY saw an ele in Mkhuze! One lone elephant. I was beginning to think there were none left. He was across a little bay in Nsumo Pan. His one leg was wounded. Thru our binnies we could see what looked like a deep, healed snare wound right round his foot.

~~oo0oo~~