Showing posts with label fauna. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fauna. Show all posts

Saturday, October 18, 2014

She's Back...for Her 11th Season!

Just arrived in Luxor at about 6 a.m. yesterday morning--10:45 p.m. flight from Paris to Cairo, 5 a.m. flight to Luxor. Exhausted but happy! It's always good to come back "home".

Slept most of yesterday, but did manage a couple of photos of my first close encounter of the cat kind, with Buttons!

After doing a bit of unpacking yesterday (in between deep sleep sessions!) and this morning, I made my way to my office and started the procedure for preparing the library for opening, probably late next week. After lunch, I took these photos of the flora of CH (since I had taken the fauna shots yesterday!):
Milk and Wine Lilies...
...fill the foyer with the most wonderful fragrance!
The breezeway garden at the beginning of the season
See you soon...

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Close Encounters of the Scorpion Kind

I had my first encounter with a scorpion today--a dead one (or so I thought at the time!). A guest here at CH found one in his bathroom and drowned it in roach spray. Once he told us about the creature we all had to traipse in to see it. He then scooped it up onto a napkin and left it to dry, after which he brought it out to the courtyard for us to see in a "drier" form. It really looked like a scorpion then. I ran to get my camera and took some shots with my hand next to it to show scale. It was pretty small, as you can see from this photo:
Well, as our guest told me at dinner tonight, it turns out that the little guy wasn't quite dead! I'm glad my guardian angel was looking out for me!

On a more pleasant note, Beau joined me on the roof for some sun worship this afternoon:
And the bee-eaters were out in force:
And one of them was actually eating a bee:

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Testing...Testing...

I am the proud owner of a new Canon PowerShot S100 (Thanks to KV and CG for their help in making the decision to purchase this particular camera and thanks to ES for transporting the camera and SL for bringing the great retro camera case to Luxor!). What follows are some of the first shots I have taken with this lovely camera. These are all "Automatic" or "Scene Selection". I haven't had a chance yet to explore the semi- and fully manual options available to me. I'm going to have to "re-learn" manual photography as I haven't had to use those skills in years!

Flora:
Poinsettia
Red Flame (Clerodendron splendens)
Persian Acacia (Albizia julibrissin)
Fauna:
Look closely for the kite in the palm tree!
Kite near their nest
Kite again
Bee-eater just before take-off!
Buttons blending in

Beau doing his third favorite thing (after eating and playing)

Landscape, Waterscape, Moon:
Gurn with clouds
Felucca at sunset
Handheld moon


 Sunsets:

Sunset and felucca from the roof
Sunset and felucca from the Winter Palace
Sunset from MY roof 
End of that same sunset
Architecture--"Old":
Luxor Temple - Colonnade Hall

Luxor Temple - Layers of history

Architecture--"New":
Winter Palace with a golden glow at sunset

Luxor door