Skip to content →

Category: miscellaneous

Namib Desert’s northwest (#27 in series: wide-angle/telephoto)

Each photo in this post has a distinctly different “feel”, I think.

All three were taken within the same “window”, of fewer than four minutes.

The (400 mm) telephoto image, below, looks closely at what occupies just a small portion of the left side of the wide-angle (30 mm) featured image, above.

Leave a Comment

Namib Desert’s northwest (#13 in series: obviously-tough)

 

This post and the next two in this series are devoted to striking examples of plants that have evolved/adapted to survive in the least-rainy part of the Namib Desert.

The featured image’s stark centre of attention is (I am almost sure) a particularly hardy member of the geranium family.

It is probably one of the “Sarcocaulons” – members of what was formerly the generally-recognised genus Sarcocaulon.

Since 1996 these plants are usually numbered as members of the genus Monsonia.

One species – which may or may not be the one pictured above – contains a highly flammable resin which persists even when the plant is “dead”…or “dead”-ish.

Leave a Comment

Namib Desert’s northwest (#3 in series: atop its edge “2”)

 

 

Our vantage point and the time/date were essentially “as per immediately-preceding post”, but instead of looking due west, to the Atlantic, this post has heads and camera turned in other directions.

To our east, south and north, the view was almost 100% “dunescape”.

Leave a Comment

Aspects of Etna (#14 in series: Etna’s cableway)

 

 

Construction of a cableway on Mount Etna began in the 1950s.

The first version began operations in 1966.

Etna first  “intervened” in 1971, destroying the cableway’s upper section.

Various other eruptions have since wreaked varying degrees of destruction, resulting in repeated closures, rebuilds and realignments.

Since the spring of 2023, the cableway and its (new) cable cars have been as they appear in my photo.

Leave a Comment