Not only does this give me a great excuse for a 2 Oceans Aquarium themed quota photo:

Bigger on black here.

It also reminds me that I did my own take on that stranded turtle post last year.

You can see my photos, follow me and whatever else you do with Instagram (I’m still learning) here.

I’m just going to see how it goes initially, but already it seems more mobile friendly than Vignette and Flickr for sharing photos. I think that that combination still has its place for longer term photo sharing though. Instagram is definitely more… instant.

Well… sorry for you.

Hectic day in the lab, babysitting this evening, football match tonight.

So here’s a sunrise that looks uncannily like a nuclear explosion, although we wouldn’t have one of those in SA, because, as JZ pointed out yesterday, everyone should be giving up nukes like South Africa did.

Bigger on black here. (The photo, not Jacob.)

Twilight on Suiderstrand beach on Saturday evening, with the waves gently rolling in onto the pebbles as the sun sank slowly, but surely, into the South Atlantic. (f/8.0, 6s).

This one was edited in the new version of Picasa (v3.9) which has some lovely new features to play with and is becoming more like Instagram every day. Meanwhile, Instagram is “very soon” to be available for Android. I’ll certainly give it a go, but I’m still a huge fan of Vignette for Android.

You may also enjoy previous desktop background suggestions from January and February.
And there are a few more photos from this weekend here.

Beautiful night by Jonina | Photo by SecondaryReality

See more via the links above.

That’s my girl on the beach, my boy in the waves, an invisible kite-surfer and blue skies forever.

Yes, it might be ever so slightly out of focus, but that was almost certainly down to sea spray on the lens, an over-abundance of sunlight and quite fitting given the two bottles of decent merlot I polished off the previous evening.

He looks a little mournful as he was being transported illegally from SA to Russia, when he was detained at Heathrow earlier this year because he wasn’t microchipped.

The animal was one of four being transported from South Africa to Russia, however checks revealed it wasn’t micro-chipped, breaching strict regulations on the movement of endangered animals.

This detention led to two pieces of bad news for our feline friend: firstly, the promises of strippers and vodka were suddenly just history, and secondly, he will now spend the rest of his days at a UK wildlife park, on average about 20ºC colder than his usual habitat in South Africa. I hope this serves as a lesson to other cheetahs trying to make the move from Africa to Northern Europe illegally. You will be captured and punished.

You can see more photos of the cheetah seized at Heathrow in the imaginatively-named Cheetah Seized At Heathrow set. And while you’re at it, don’t miss the excellent Marriage Cheat Sheets Exposed set, in which some marriage cheat sheets are exposed, including some confusion over Maria’s siblings. Like whether or not they actually exist.

With that landmark reached, here’s one I like from the horribly aborted Last Hurrah 2010 tour.

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but suffice to say that the World Cup helped quite a bit. As has Katrin Müller-Hohenstein’s bottom, which – depressingly – remains my most viewed photo from the tournament. Depressingly because it’s rubbish (the photograph – her bottom is lovely). Here it is again with ex-German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn looking on.

But I digress. Often.

If you’ve ever looked at any of my photos, thanks. If you haven’t, now would be the perfect time to start as I begin my journey on the path towards 200,000 views.

Wow – I said that like it was a good thing. Meh – it was fun evening: good food, good company, crap music.

After yesterday’s near miss when it came to getting up the West Coast, today’s return journey was rather unexciting, tinged with heat, more heat, a lack of sleep, some heat and a mild hangover.

Passing Koeberg

Mrs 6k drove and I looked out of the window at the scenery passing by at *cough* 120kph. This grey one sums up how I’m feeling this evening – distinctly lacking colour.

The bread is made, the uniforms are ironed and it’s back to school for our two tomorrow. Back to some sort of normality here too – but right now, I need my bed.

On Christmas morning IanVisits got up early and took pictures of an almost empty London.

And then he wrote about it on his blog:

London is never silent, not even at 3am, but on Xmas morning, it is almost silent. The background drone of aircraft approaching Heathrow has gone, and away from main roads, the streets lack the sound of car tyres rolling over tarmac.

My favourite image is this one of a deserted Waterloo Bridge:

You can see the full set here. And you should note that this isn’t the first time IanVisits has visited London on Christmas morning. He did it in 2010 and 2008 as well.

Photo © IanVisits on Flickr.