It’s that time of year again: Thomas is digging. For a while now, as he said, because the first early bloomers in his garden have already gone the way of all things. I’m a bit late with the first photos, but here they are, continuing the series I started last year in my neighbor Thomas’s garden.

Just in time for the first buds on the trees, two funny fellows have taken up residence in the garden, even though, judging by their clothing, they were hoping for summer.

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Someone like me, with two hearts beating in its chest - web development and photography - always pays close attention when it comes to combining the two. Just like Adam Argyle’s new article CSS Carousel In Chrome 135, in which he refers to a new blog post by the Chrome Dev Team that deals with using the new CSS Overflow Module Level 5 to build image carousels that no longer require JavaScript … Carousels with CSS. How cool is that!

Not that I use something like this on my website, but in the last few months I have collected a few Codepens on the topic, simply because I like them and maybe use them in one place or another. Almost all of them use JavaScript somewhere and not yet the above-mentioned possibilities of pure CSS, but I am sure that one or the other in this form will manage without JS in the future, once the browsers widely support the new stuff. Until then, these solutions are a good way to go.

• Responsive Image Accordion
• CSS Scroll-Driven Image Carousel
• CSS infinite scroll gallery
• Responsive Grid Image Gallery
• Slanted grid gallery
• Responsive Vertical Scrolling Parallax Gallery
• Smooth Scrolly Images

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This is the fourth and final part of the photographic documentation of my 3-week trip through South Africa at the end of last year. My wife and I traveled over 1,700km (or about 1,000 miles) by car and my cameras took 4,366 photos. 865 of them made it to be shown after editing in Lightroom, 495 of them also made it to the public on this website. An acceptable average for a hobby photographer, I guess.

When we started planning the trip along the South African coast, Cape Town was already set as the start and end point, if only for logistical reasons. Choosing a national park for safaris (or game drives, as we later learned to say) wasn’t that difficult either, as Addo is not far from the coast and is one of the top 10 South African national parks. We only needed to make a few stops so that we didn’t have to drive 800km in one go. The choice fell on Mossel Bay on the outward route and Plettenberg Bay on the return route. We wanted to spend the last two days in tranquil Stellenbosch, not far from Cape Town, to wind down a little before heading back home for the winter.

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I unorthodoxly started my photographic review of my journey through South Africa in the middle and the highlights with my two posts Addo Elephant National Park and Schotia Safaris Private Game Reserve, but of course there was also a beginning, namely in Cape Town, where me and my sweetheart landed in mid-December after an 11.5 hour flight from Frankfurt.

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My first photo post about my trip to South Africa was about pictures from the huge Addo Elephant National Park, where you can drive around for days and still see something new. Directly adjacent to it is the Schotia Safaris Private Game Reserve, a much smaller and privately run park that only offers guided tours, but with more service around it.

Another difference is that state-run national parks such as Addo are only allowed to have animals that occur naturally in the area. This is different in private reserves and so in Schotia (named after a protected old tree species) you will find giraffes, wildebeests, impalas, hippos, crocodiles and rhinos alongside the animals of the area, such as elephants, buffaloes, kudus and warthogs.

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In 2024, the best wife in the world and I had decided that it was time to explore South Africa, especially as I had never been south of the equator, but she had already traveled to the southernmost tip of Africa with a friend 10 years ago and had been raving about it ever since. I also can’t remember having allowed myself three weeks in a row to relax, but for a trip like this it needs to be, and preferably over the Christmas holidays to escape the hustle and bustle in Germany. No “Oh Tannenbaum”, “Kling Glöckchen Klingelingeleing” with a disgusting warm spiced red wine in my hand, but elephant stamping at 32 degrees in the shade … Yes!

We had planned our trip as a round trip: first Cape Town and Hout Bay, then east by car towards Mossel Bay and on to Addo. Then back via Plettenberg Bay and some Stellenbosch in the last two days to round off the experience. Always with me, of course, my camera(s) … I had already assumed that I would take a few more photos in South Africa than usual, but in the end I ended up with 4,366 shots (!) and 82GB of RAW data, which I synchronized with my server at home wherever I had WiFi.

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Since yet another tech billionaire (this time the one from Meta) has decided that he can go without morality and decency and crawl as far as possible into the far-right a*** of the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States, there has been a considerable significant migration of users from Instagram to the Fediverse alternative Pixelfed, a photo-centric platform that has so far led a rather shadowy existence alongside the big player Mastodon.

I am very pleased about the fact that the Pixelfed inventor @Dansup currently has to increase the resources of his pixelfed.social server every day, on which I also have an account, to cope with the rush. Instagram is, alongside Threads, the last meta-product where I have an account, and I can only welcome an open and decentralized counterweight to it.

But I have to admit that although I regularly publish my photos on Pixelfed, I’m not 100% satisfied with the platform. On the one hand, the UI and handling are currently (still) quite clumsy and on the other hand, it is more a platform for everyday pictures of the selfie generation than a photo platform, as 500px has been for me for years. I spend my free time with photography and therefore want to present my work primarily in the context of a portfolio-based approach. This is only partially the case for Pixelfed, due to its focus on being an Instagram replacement.

I feel much more comfortable on the new and rising star in the Fediverse sky called Vernissage by Marcin Czachurski, that I discovered a few weeks ago and fell in love with.

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