If something characterizes the Andalusian Holy Week, it is the fragrance of orange blossom in its streets, full of orange trees -which give sour orange. The beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday, is almost synchronized with the appearance of the first orange blossoms. Azahar is a word of Arabic origin, az-zahr, which means “white flower“. In my portfolio I have a photo gallery of the Marchena orange blossom.
However, just 47 days before Holy Week, all the streets are still under construction. Will the works be finished on time? We will have to ask María del Mar Romero Aguilar, mayoress of Marchena. The route of the Three Kings parade had to be changed, and it did not end well.
It’s been a very long time since I last posted anything about Paquito, my hand-raised cockatiel, who recently turned 15. The reason is that for the past few years his feathers have been in very poor condition and he hasn’t been feeling well. Apparently, in the end it turned out to be fatty liver disease (a very common condition in this species) caused by feeding him a diet made up only of seeds. That’s the only kind of food they sell here in Marchena for cockatiels, and I didn’t know it was unhealthy for them. Since I started buying him a pellet food on Amazon (one made for budgerigars, because the one made for cockatiels is too large for him to eat, but he absolutely loves the budgie one—I buy one called Versele‑Laga B14), he has become much more lively. He chatters constantly and has started molting his feathers, so I hope that this time they will grow back beautiful and healthy.
Cockatiels belong to the parrot family. Like parakeets and other psittacine species such as parrots and cockatoos, when humans hand-feed them from a very young age with formula, they become familiar with people, very tame, and can learn words and whistles. In this particular case, I wasn’t the one who hand-fed him. A breeder from Palma del Río (Córdoba) raised him and sold him to me already hand-fed, when he was about 30 days old. I went to pick him up there on December 28, 2010—I still remember the date. His name is Paquito because he started saying it before I had even chosen a name for him. It turns out the breeder kept him in a cage with his father—what he called his “tutor”—so he could learn from him, because his father used to say “Paquito” a lot. An interesting curiosity about cockatiels is that they are the species of bird that sneezes the most. It’s very funny to watch them sneeze. It’s not because they have a cold; it’s just something they commonly do.
I made this video when he turned 10 years old to post on my social media. It’s a compilation of different videos I had of him.
If the plan doesn’t work, change the plan, but never the goal
Now that the second video of the Marchena 2023 fair is almost ready to publish, I would like to clarify some things.
The first thing is that I am not going to publish the photos here on the website until I have published the third video on YouTube, so as not to “spoil” any surprises ahead of time.
The second thing is that I do all of this by myself. I don’t have any team of people by my side, no assistants or anything. And I do everything with a very small budget. My camera is a Canon DSLR, yes, but a very cheap, beginner’s model. If it looks so good and so professional it is because I know how to get the most out of it due to my many years of experience taking photos. However, I only started making videos a year ago, during Easter 2022. Many problems with my videos are due to my lack of experience and others are due to using a cheap camera. Problems with focus, with sometimes everything looking TOO close, and above all, problems with STABILIZATION, or rather, the lack of it. Because my camera does not have a stabilizer, and I have to use an option in the video editor on the computer to stabilize by software, but it is super slow and makes a lot of mistakes, it makes strange movements, as you can see in the videos. To avoid having this problem I need a 4,000 euro camera (Canon R5), which would also solve the problems of blurring and everything being seen too close.
Another thing is that the videos take me forever to make. Apart from the fact that it is a laborious job in itself, the computer takes a long time processing. And between the analysis of the stabilization, the export, the reconversion to 4K, and the upload to YouTube, hours and hours are spent. I have a 2011 Mac Mini that is already asking for retirement.
Since I have to add a photo to the publication, I’m posting a preview of one of the photos from the fair. The one on the right is my cousin Teresa.