Author: DMcA

The Cape is very British in many aspects, most notably in its attitude to the seaside. There are very glamorous beaches near Cape Town city which are reminiscent of the Côte d’Azur, and then 5 miles away you have to pinch yourself to remember you are not at Margate. It’s the latter I hugely favour, of course.

I ended up with very little time to do any street or beach photography, which is in general much less focussed than birds in flight or seascapes, and consists of wandering around for hours waiting for something to happen. But people did come into the scene while I was shooting BIF or harbours, and on my penultimate day I spent a wonderful few hours before dinner at Fishhoek beach, which is one of the most traditional on the coast.

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I first started photographing birds in flight (BIF) in 2017 in Cape Town. I had previously been concentrating only on sea and riverscapes, and street photography. The word was that proficiency in BIF was hard, and expensive as it needed special lenses, great technique and high-speed cameras for any kind of success. I rapidly found out that this was extremely true.

Technology and my technique have improved massively since then, and this trip I returned to again photograph the mighty Sacred Ibis, an amazing bird, which congregates in significant numbers very close to our house in Noordhoek. While in pre-Covid times, I would often return from a photography session with no usable photographs at all, the situation has changed such that I now get literally thousands of them. Don’t worry, you don’t have to look at them all, but it has enabled me to focus in on the real magic of these very special creatures. I have written an extensive post on the improvements in cameras, lenses and technique over the last seven years here, and it’s worth a read if you want to understand how these shots were taken

As with Gannets, the appearance and aerodynamics of the Sacred Ibis are startlingly different between their flight mode (legs straight out)and their landing mode (legs down). The first half of the album shows their beautiful wings in flight. The second half shows the apparent utter disarray of their landing. What looks like chaos in the wing department is a actually very effective selection of flaps, ailerons and spoilers to slow and control the descent of a pretty large chunk of bird. You absolutely cannot see this display with the naked eye, so as with long exposure, the camera can enable you to see the otherwise unseeable.

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This is the second album of Cape Town seascapes. Many of the locations are the same as in the first album, but at different times, from different locations, with different skies or using different techniques. My goal in splitting the photos into two albums is that you may look at these amazing places with a different perspective the second time, not least because the entire feeling of this place can change in minutes and certainly days.

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In March 2024 I returned to our place in Cape Town for the first time since 2019. Circumstances like Covid and grandchildren had kept us away, and my main intention was to start the process of selling it. As it turned out, I fell in love with this incredibly beautiful and civilised area all over again, so we’ll keep the house for a little while yet.

One of my other goals for the trip was to revisit the area and take some definitive shots of the sea, birds and people, in case this was my last trip. Over the 22 years we have owned this house, I have taken many shots, but only a very few that I really liked. That was partly because of time – kids, social engagements and the many things you have to do after a long time away, take your focus off photography – but also because pre-Covid, cameras, software and my technique were not as advanced as they are now.

I usually do a short description of the technique involved with these shots, but it grew so long that I have moved it to a separate post here. These photos are all of seascapes within 5 miles of our house (which is in Noordhoek in the southern peninsula) wiith the exception of the Cape Point shots which were about 20 miles away. I don’t know a world-class city anywhere that has this kind of scenery so close by (with the possible exception of San Francisco), and I haven’t really scratched the surface. I got far more shots than I expected, so have decided to show them all but split into two albums of which this is the first. I hope you like them.

Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right hand corner to get the best viewing experience. And for information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little ‘i’ icon