Tale of a Tail

You don't need to tell me that this is not the greatest photo of a black cockatoo.  It does capture the colour of his/her tail though. I did complain about them not cooperating with me and letting me photograph their tails in this post.  So, on a later visit to Balgal Beach I stalked them while they were feeding in a casurina tree and getting up to all sorts of mischief at the same time.  The cockatoos that is, not me.  This was the best tail photo I snapped.

You can see why any photography enthusiast would want to capture that.  I'll keep trying to do better though.

Ansel Adams in the making

I was feeling a bit sad that Cheetah often seemed to miss out on being posted on my blog. The main reason being that he is usually at school when I am out and about with my camera. But this weekend he stayed with us for a sleep-over on Friday night, so on Saturday after visiting the McT clan for a play, I asked him if he wanted to take some pictures of himself with my camera and remote control.

We pulled down our huge roller blind to act as a backdrop and set up the tripod and camera and, hey presto! we had our studio. I was there mainly to prevent him from tripping over the tripod in his haste to check his settings and review his photos and sending my precious camera onto the unforgiving tiles, but I did give some tuition along the way. During the studio session part of the exercise, Cheetah learned a bit about white balance, composition and depth of field. 89 photos later. . . and he was ready to hand over the remote and download the photos.























Not content with just being a child prodigy photographer, he wanted to learn and do his own photo editing as well. The results are here to be seen. Entirely his own ideas and his own work. We opened up Picasa 3 (great free photo editor from google), I gave him a few minutes to experiment and get the hang of the program and his imagination obviously took over.

I only intervened when he wanted to post a reward on the wanted poster. Paranoid Grannysaurus could just imagine some nutter taking it seriously. I still feel a bit twitchy about the "dead or alive" issue.

It's hard to believe that these creative pics are all entirely his own work at 9 years old, but I promise you they are.

I'm sure he would love to read your comments if you are as impressed with his artistic flair as I am.


This won't be the last time that I feature Cheetah's art on this blog. Not now that I know what he can do.

Dragon calls the shots (click on the collage for a larger view)

Mummy and Wolf McTavish wanted to give Lion a big surprise because he had been such a good boy this week and even longer. His surprise was going to the cinema for the very first time. The movie they went to see was Madagascar 2. Dragon is a bit too little (and lively) to sit through a whole movie and besides this was Lion's treat, so Dragon came to spend the afternoon with Grandma and Grandad (Grannysaurus and Mr Sunshine).
This was no 2nd-best for Dragon because it meant that he would be an "only grandchild" for at least two hours. No competition for the toys, the attention, the food or the affection. What's not to like about that?
After we had practised ball throwing and catching and basket ball into the laundry basket, timed races up and down the hall on Dragon's "fave....rit.....bike" (Dragon always speaks in staccato syllables), and helped Mr Sunshine shift 2 cupboards onto the ute to take to Aunty Chimera and baked muffins to share with Mummy, Daddy and Lion when they came back, we decided this needed a photographic record. This is where Dragon really called the shots, dictating what photos we would take and where, especially the one with him holding up his pink handbag and the one with him wearing Grannysaurus' plastic shoes and nursing his bike with his "sun... ny... glass... es" on his head. His pink pig handbag is on his lap, but you can't see that. His daddy says it is a "wild-boar man bag".
The top, middle one of Mr Sunshine waving from his recliner is the photo that Dragon took all by himself. His first attempt at photography and he was pleased with it. Not bad- being a published photographer at 2.
It was a great afternoon. We ate the muffins and Lion and Dragon (their parents too, of course) ended up staying for dinner which they, Lion and Dragon, helped prepare. That meant about three times the washing up because Grannysaurus, Dragon and Lion all had to have a mixing bowl and paraphernalia each. I think they both went home very satisfied with their day.
Mr Sunshine is still catching up on the washing up.