Emmy is the Siberian Husky my family got when I was 16, back in 1999. In this picture, taken in September, 2010, she is 11 ½ — an ageing lady. She’s still playful, however, and she loves the w-word (walk — properly, the t-word in Norwegian (‘tur’)).

This little guy is a golden monkey, or more formally a patas monkey. Again, in Bandia Wildlife Reserve in Senegal.

Yes, it’s a zebra, wild and free… Well, can we really make the case that any animal today is truly free? Bandia Wildlife Reserve was not large. Especially in Africa and Europe. National parks and wilderness areas are more like fenced enclaves, little lungs of green space where animals can live ‘au naturel’. Nature no longer surrounds us, we surround nature. This really is the anthropecene: the human age. But not for this zebra: it’s the age of zebras, a great time for zebrakind. The leaves are green, hormones are flowing and those stripes really look fabulous on you dear, did you get them polished?

Ben, my awesome supervisor, took me on safari outside of Dakar in Bandia private game reserve. I also got to see more of Senegal (a bit more) than just Dakar — including hours of traffic jam to get there, lots of little towns and villages and a rolling, dry, bushy and undeveloped landscape, with the odd baobab tree (a fantastic wooden construction, several metres in diameter). An dried out radiator was also part of the experience, something we had to fix with bottled water (and a later visit to a service station).

The reserve was small, but had lots of animals: giraffes, monkeys, different types of antelope, rhinos, water buffalo and… hehe…. ostriches. This one didn’t care for us — it was maybe a metre away from the car when I took this picture. I quickly closed the window, and it started pecking :P

More animals coming.

I shamelessly intruded on this swan’s privacy. Captured on Lake Ontario in Port Dalhousie in February with my 300mm. Birds have never been safe from ‘big brother’.

I just took a few hundred pictures off my camera, dating back as far as Christmas. My memory card reader went on the fritz. Here’s Helios, licking sun from his namesake.

I got a good picture of Morpheus, his black features are hard to capture.

I finally got to take a close-up of a dragonfly. A bunch of them were swarming in the garden all evening, and one obliged to sit on a flower for a while so I could take pictures. I used the 50mm with one +4 close-up filter (magnification filter) and one +2 filter. I was extremely pleased by the outcome. This picture is actually true macro, meaning the dragonfly depicted is greater than 1:1.

From my Maskwa trip: the 11-year-old daughter of the guy that owned the cabin we rented found this snapping turtle on the riverbank. She’s the one holding it, so keep that in mind when you try to judge how small it is.

I used my Nikon 50mm with a +4 close-up filter. Depending on what definition you use, it qualifies as macro-photography. On a regular sized print (15x10cm, 6x4in), it would be very close to 1:1.

Installment two: prairie dog eating.