Archive for the 'Wildlife photo' category

Pygargue à tête blanche - Copyright (C) Yves Roumazeilles

The Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) is a bird of prey found in North America that is most recognizable as the national bird and symbol of the United States of America.

You can buy an original print at RedBubble.

I am leaving France for a photo trip to Nepal. Why did my colleagues pay a part of that trip?

I couldn’t resist and I bring you this image I found on an automobile-oriented blog (autoblog).

Met in the forest of Rambouillet (near Paris, but more precisely in the fern land at the end of the Espace Rambouillet of Office National des Forêts), two roe deers that were stuck in the sights of two camouflaged wildlife photographers.

Roe deers (Click to enlarge)

No! This is not the title of Hollywood next horror flick. This is a sad reality around Japan. According to National Geographic, for reasons that are not entirely understood giant jellyfish like the ones photographed below are observed in great quantities.

They need to be harvested by boat…

I’m just out of eBay where I bought a second-hand Minolta 1.4x lens converter to extend a little my tele-lenses when I put them on my Sony Alpha 700 and the old faithful Konica-Minolta Dynax Maxxum 7D.

I think it is going to support me when I go to Nepal (Bardia National Park) in next October. With Alain Pons and Amawanda.

A friend of mine recently bought a copy of a Japanese wood engraving. While reading this article from BibliOdyssey, about the wood engravings of Kitagawa Utamaro, I thought I should share some of the pictures of this artist.

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

If you want to know more, you can even buy those horse legs.

…but I couldn’t fly.

Jose Luis Ortiz has changed it all. He installed a small video camera on one of his royal eagles.

And now, you and me can fly, really fly. Breath-taking! Boarding a plane became so down-to-Earth. I now want to have wings, I want to fly like an eagle…

I have been publishing some photos from my travel to Kenya last October, but it became apparent to me that I had forgotten to present the photos I took during a short encounter with a serval (Leptailurus serval, previously Felis serval, pronounced /ˈsÉœrvÉ™l/) which is a relatively large-size African wild cat. Amazingly beautiful, it is quite difficult to observe by day. Actually, it’s Alain Pons (our guide and famous wildlife photographer) who called “Stop!” after seeing a pair of ears just a couple of inches above the grass of the Masai Mara. Even, after braking hard, it took us some time to find it again.

Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles	Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles	Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Serval - Copyright (C) 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles
Click on the image to enlarge thumbnails

On the last picture, you can notice the black and white pattern of the back of the serval ears. They are considered as a beacon to help kittens follow their mother, giving them very visible indicators that stay invisible from the point of view of their preys.

Masque

An advanced civilisation if there was one, Aztecs lived in Central America from IXth Century to XVth Century (when their decline was essentially precipitated by their encounter with the Spanish conquistadores). Many facets of this civilisation stay unknown principally because they were wiped out wy the first European colonizers.

But one aspect stayed deep in the minds because it was an immediate shock to those who were meeting it for the first time: Aztecs practiced extensive human sacrifice when Cortés arrived in America. Rare are the Europeans who observed it first-hand, because it stopped quickly then, but many traces are left for the historian.

Generally, religious reasons (”gods are asking for peace brought to them through human bloodshed in their honor”) are shown as the main driving factor. I found a group of articles quite intersting because they discuss the vertus and weaknesses of another theory: That Aztecs needed to enrich their meals with meat that could only be obtained from cannibalism.

• The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, by Michael Harner (April 1977)
• Aztec Cannibalism: An Ecological Necessity? by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano (May 1978)

I can’t guarantee the quality of the scientific arguments by myself, but -for the reader with a strong heart- the LatinAmericanStudies.org web site contains historical data about the Aztecs grouped in a quite enthralling scientific package.

Additional references:

1. Wikipedia article on the Aztecs.
2. Photos about the Jaguar and Ocelotl, the jaguar Aztec god.

…up to the point of creating a chocolate-inspired video?

…or up to the point of sacrificing chocolate for the sake of pure art?

No fish for 1st of April!
These are bunnies.

Link love

Those are the best links I found recently. I could not write a full post about them, but they are worth visiting:

• Box.net launches a web-based free word processor (via Download Squad)
• Histoface: How to hide an image in the histogram of another image
• Safer Code – Secure Coding In C \ C++ is a blog about such issues as writing clean C/C++ code.

Most-read articles

The news as you make it:

• Download free Nero 8
• Sharks and other sea jaws
• Art Nouveau Design

Most visited categories

Your attention does not stop to 1 post only:

• Gorilla in Wildlife (digital photography)
• Nikon D300 (SLR photo camera) that can be complemented with the YLovePhoto.com similar category about the Nikon SLR family

If you want to meet dinosaurs, not only paintings or sculptures, go to the USA, fly to Los Angeles, California. There, in the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, there are free-roaming dinosaurs in the corridors. Not only are these automatons sized impressively, but they intereact with people and kids around them.

Woah! Stunning!

Ten days ago, I went walking in the bois de Vincennes, near Paris, my photo camera in hand in the footsteps of Fabrice Hénon who accepted to share some of his informations. I’m back with pictures of Eurasian Jay and common kestrel.

Common kestrel

Eurasian Jay

All the photos are on www.YLovePhoto.com :

• Eurasian Jay
• Common kestrel

Everything points at a stark increase of elephant poaching in Kenya after years of relative calm. More precisely, in the Tsavo National Park, in the 6 most recent weeks, rangers of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) found 5 dead elephants whose tusks have been sawed.

This is a reminder that some habits which we thought mostly gone are not. Sales of ivory (includign the official ones) are on the rise and there would be some troubling links here. Nevertheless, the KWS rangers already arrested two men and seized AK-47 assault rifles with ammunitions, but it could well be only the tip of a rising iceberg.

Source: Futura-Sciences.