Travel Day
Filed Under: personal
I am traveling to Oregon today and will be slow to respond to emails. Rest assured that I want to hear from you and I will respond as soon as I can. Until then, have a good one!
Filed Under: personal
I am traveling to Oregon today and will be slow to respond to emails. Rest assured that I want to hear from you and I will respond as soon as I can. Until then, have a good one!
Filed Under: Science
Besides my ostrich encounter, there were really only two occasions where I felt that my life was threatened by wildlife in Kenya. There were several occasions of fearing for my life involving other people, but that’s another post.The incident happened in Tsavo. Tsavo is famous for one thing in particular. Man-eating lions. Around the turn of the century, Colonel Patterson was tasked with building a bridge for the British Empire (a bridge that still stands today, and is not remotely impressive). He watched in horror as worker after worker (mostly “coolies” from India) were dragged away, killed, and devoured. Eventually, Patterson killed two lions, but only after unbelievable difficulties. The lions were named The Ghost and The Darkness, and a film about this incident starring Val Kilmer came out in the mid-90s. The lions’ bodies are on display in the Chicago Museum of Natural History. They are male lions, but they have no manes. None of the male lions in Tsavo have them. Upon seeing the area, you would immediately realize why.
Tsavo was green and dense with thorny thicket when we camped there. It was not like the rest of the African savannah. It is almost certain that the male lions of Tsavo do not have manes because if they did, they would never make it ten feet through the underbrush.
The first night we made camp, we could hear lions roaring as the sun set. It was the first time we had heard anything like it, and we were all thrilled. We put our tents, which were made for three people. After an evening around the fire, we all retired to our tents. I slept for a few hours, but woke some time after midnight with a pressing need to ah, relieve myself. There was only one problem.
The roaring continued, but it was much, much closer now. Without opening the tent, it sounded as if a lion was not more than 30 yards away. Another lion was answering this lion from the opposite side of our camp.
I tried to hold it as best I could, but eventually, I absolutely had to go to the bathroom. I roused my tent mates and we opened the ten flap just a bit and pointed our flashlights into the darkness. The eyes of something flashed green at the very edge of the light. The roaring stopped.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to step right outside the tent, and piss to the left. You guy watch those eyes, and if they start coming towards me, say something.” And that’s what I did. It seemed like I was urinating the contents of a small ocean. I kept my eyes on my business and did not look at the lion. If I did, I, well, froze up. Finally, I squeezed out the last drop of fluid and not even pausing to zip my fly, I dove inside the tent.
The eyes never moved. We sealed up the tent and went back to sleep as best we could with massive cats roaring all night. In the morning, the lions were gone.
I can’t remember where the second brush with death happened. It was either Tsavo also, or Amboseli. We were riding in a Land Rover down a muddy road in the park, and the brush was fairly thick on either side of the road. Everything that wasn’t green with life was a dark red from the clay mud. Wildlife was hard to spot. I stood on my seat, holding onto the edges of the hole in the roof, and scanned with binoculars, looking for something interesting. Then, the driver spotted it.
A bull elephant came out of the brush not even twenty feet from us. His skin was streaked red, and his tusks were almost four feet long. He took a hesitant step, then flared his great ears forward. I snapped a shot with my camera. Then, he charged.
Our driver gunned the engine, and we tore off down the road. The elephant stopped in the road behind us and raised his trunk in disdain. For less than a second, I was pretty sure I was going to be thrown from the Rover and trampled to death. Everyone in the vehicle laughed hysterically, and I mean that literally, for half an hour afterward.
Hi! My name is Jeremiah Tolbert, but you can call me Jeremy. I am a fantasy and science fiction writer, photographer, and web designer living in Northern Colorado. I am currently starting a new job and cannot take freelance work at this time. Drop me a line if you have any questions or comments. I love hearing from new people and I now have a lot more time to chat.
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I forget where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of quality I’d like to see in more book trailers online:
Having Tim Curry as a narrator is probably outside of the range of what we can afford as SF/F writers, but still. Let’s go over what makes this awesome:
Tight pacing. 2 minutes [...]

A concrete building in Old Town, reminiscent of Soviet Russia. Once a warehouse of sorts, it is now a very badly maintained apartment building, at least from the outside. Hmm, that sky didn't look like that when I was working in photoshop. Single exposure RAW experiment.

The trees of Vedawoo are twisted and gnarled by the high winds at that altitude much of the year. Not much grows up here, but what does is very hardy.

From the right angle, these rocks look like praying hands, and I've always called them Prayer Rock. More haloing than I would like. I should probably process this one again, but I really like the foreground.

The sun was at one of those great angles where everything low was still in the shjade, but the rocks were lit brightly. This is the kind of shooting opportunity that HDR was made for. This is one of my favorites, and is in excellent focus compared to some others. No matter what your shutter speed, you _cannot_ handshoot HDR.

Another capture of the early dawn in Vedawoo, a rock formation in Wyoming. This reflects the pinkness of the sky very well.

More of the Vedawoo rock formation in Wyoming. This is taken just barely after the sun came up. Everything was covered in frost and snow, resulting in a blue/pink miracle. Less hyper-real, more true to the actual situation. Oddly, a little bit of vignetting in the top left and right, but not elsewhere. I'm not sure how that happened. Actually might be caused by the highlight smoothing, come to think. I've been trying to eliminate the halo effect, which is what I like least in HDR, but it's hard in these landscape shots.

The Vedawoo rock formations in Wyoming at dawn. It's not quite in focus. I need to work on my tripod locking. The blur I think comes from alignment issues.



Trying to bring back the effect a bit. Was too much in the old version.
