I used to live near  lakes with flamingos on. Sometimes there would only be a few perhaps 20, but other days there could be 200 of them. It always amazed me to see them.  They used to be in the salt lakes and in the sea, well kind of sea, a sort of lake formed by the sea and connected to it. This is where I used to see lots of flamingos.  Growing up as a child the most exotic thing I saw in the wild was a sparrow! Although I did once come across a small lizard which I thought was fantastic. But in the southeast of England the wildlife is not exotic although there are lots of gorgeous animals, to us at least, they not exotic.  So when as an adult I moved to a country where flamingos and parrots were wild I was enthralled to see them every time.

They were not all pink either, some were more white than pink but that may have been due to level of light, their diet of course and perhaps reflections from the water etc. My wonderful friend Rosa, who has since passed away took me to see them from her favourite viewing spot. It was, to me a guy from Essex, an experience full of wonder. We walked through grasses that were taller than me and every now and then there were palm trees, date palms mainly, shooting high out of the grasses and filled with green parakeets. We were not hacking our way through the undergrowth but were in fact on a rather lovely wooden pathway with hand rails that lead from the carpark through to the lake shore. If you took the other path you ended up in a couple of minutes at the shops and restaurants that lined the yacht club.  Even so, to me this was brilliant, and I enjoyed every second of it. We saw lots of flamingos and as this was in fact about 20 minutes from my house, I went there lots of times over the years.

There salt lakes not very far from the main road coast road and so simply driving along from one town to another we would see flamingos all the time in them. The first time my parents came over we were driving along this road and dad could not believe his eyes, “Are those flamingos over there”? he asked. He could hardly believe his eyes.
“Oh yes, they’re everywhere here”, I found myself nonchalantly replying. How soon we adapt!

I do not live there anymore after a few years I moved to another exciting destination and completely different experience, Madrid. No flamingos there, but still I has tree full of those green parakeets right outside my bedroom window. I loved the noise they made and it never bothered me at all.

Well back to flamingos. As you may already have worked out, the flamingos in the images so far, on my site are not wild ones from my past, I shot them in captivity. I will have to return to the lakes of years gone by one of these days and photograph them there, actually writing this has made me want to do that, evoking wonderful memories and so I am going to do just that. Maybe next year.

I have played around with the image in Flamingo 01. Having created several versions in various colours etc. I like to manipulate the image and tweak it sometimes although not always and in this case Flamingo 01 is as it was shot. It is the other versions Flamingo 01 v1 – v6 that are the tweaked images. I wanted to create images that would suit different spaces and give a different mood and I think I done that with this collection. Flamingo 07 is a completely different image altogether and I enjoyed altering the colour by allowing only parts of the birds natural colours to come through. They truly are beautiful birds and I sure these images will look great in many spaces.

 

All the flamingo images are available in my on-line shop in various sizes.