NOVEMBER 2011 – Two vultures sit in heavy rain on a dead branch of a tree in the Kruger National Park, South Africa. © Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com
The story behind the image
Can you imagine this? We arrived for a trip of a lifetime at the Kruger National Park in South Africa, and it started to pour rain! This experience seems to be a standard for us. Back in 2004 we explored the Garden Route in South Africa and encountered – rain, prompting one of the hotel owners to say: “Rain! It’s a blessing!” Or Scotland – duing high summer in Oban, we lost at two days due to heavy rain. Well, well.
So, it was pouring rain and we were driving, slowly and always cautious, along the main road towards north. After a while we noticed a number of vultures in the trees (but too far away for a decent shot), a good indicator that some ‘activity’ was happening. And yes, maybe two hundred meters onwards we saw these two vultures sitting on a a dead branch of a tree. They did not look happy at all. Their feathers completely wet, and the rain drops were running down their beaks. But they were patiently waiting for their main course. A group of lions had killed an animal and was now enjoying the meal, maybe 50 meters behind them.
So why this image today? Well, well. I received an email this morning from WordPress:
From April 30, 2023 you will no longer be able to share your WordPress.com posts automatically to Twitter using Jetpack Social.
Email from WordPress, received April 30, 2023
Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, we will need to remove the functionality.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter back in November 2022 I was full of hope for the platform, and indeed some of the changes were useful to re-establish the original ideas behind the service. But the mail above shows that the cute little Twitter bird has changed. A lot.
While I understand the need of the platform to make money, the management should realize that they are making this money exclusively off third-party content that is provided to them free of charge. Consequently, they should make it as easy and convenient for content providers to share their content with the platform. For me, it’s not worth the effort to manually push content to Twitter, so I will wait for the automatic Instagram integration announced by WordPress.
Good Night, Twitter.
The high resolution image
| Capture Date & Time | 24-NOV-2011, 15:01 |
| Location | Kruger National Park, South Africa |
| Camera | Canon EOS-1D Mark III |
| Lens | Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM |
| ISO | 800 |
| Exposure | 1/1000 sec at f/5.6 |
| Digital Image Source Format | Canon Camera RAW (CR2) |
| Edited Image Format | JPEG, 24 bits/pixel, sRGB |
| Edited Image Dimensions | 3424 x 1926 Pixels |
| Copyright | © by Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com |
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