My other language is photography…it helps me communicate the joy I feel when I see extraordinary things in the everyday. So it’s very frustrating when I can’t quite capture what I see with my camera. Tuesday night was such an occasion. I was drawn out of my bedroom by flashes of light from beyond my curtain. I stepped into the cool night air and the view I saw took my breath away. A rare cloudless night with innumerable stars scattered across the charcoal grey sky. Big, bright stars, smaller stars gathered like dust swooping down from the heavens. No light pollution to hide them. As I gazed up through the branches of the big tree beside my cottage it looked like it was dressed in hundreds of fairy lights.
Then, low on the distant horizon, behind the trees, flashes of lighting illuminated the whole circumference of my view. It was so bright yet still couldn’t dampen the brightness of the stars. I’ve never seen anything like it and even though I knew that without a tripod for my camera, wide angle lens and shutter release button I didn’t have a hope of capturing the brilliance of what I saw I still went to grab my camera. I had to try!
And the results didn’t come close to the reality but here they are anyway. I hope your imagination can fill in the rest!
However, over the last 2 and a half weeks there have been lots of wonderful things to photograph every day. Here are a few of my favourite ones.
Ichushi is one very photogenic little kitten. He’s curled up on my lap as I type but the other day he decided to climb a tree and pretend like he was happy being up there in spite of the real reason being that he couldn’t get down.
I love this photo below for the feeling of peace I get looking at it, the splashes of colour in the flowers and the texture of the thatch. A few days after this photo was taken, a rather large snake was found resting in all that leftover thatch!
The interns that take part in the Foundations Zambia program come to work on their bikes and they get parked by the fields where they tend the crops. I was delighted to spend some time trying all sorts of different angles and apertures.
And finally, on Saturday we went for a little nature walk along the river that runs from the new dam to the older dam down stream. A plane flew over head and as is tradition with the Vissani family, everyone stopped and waved. I just love this photo! I can’t put into words as to why but then that’s ok because a photo is another language and sometimes you can’t translate it into English. I hope you like it too.
I’d love to hear about how you feel when you look at these photos. Feel free to comment here or on my Facebook page.