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Africa Trip -
January 2012 -Tanzania
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Africa Trip -
January 2012 -Tanzania
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Intro
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In January of 2012 Linda and
I
returned to Africa to explore the eastern part of the continent in the
beautiful country of
Tanzania. We had explored the southern part of the continent on
our mobile safari to South
Africa and Botswana in September of 2010 and we had caught the
safari bug. We traveled again with the tour company
Wilderness Travel based
in Berkeley. We flew into the country right over
Mount Kilimanjaro
and joined our group in the town of
Arusha. For the next
14 days we traveled through the
Ngorongoro Conservation area and the
Serengeti Plains on a mobile safari, observing and photographing the
landscape, wildlife and people of this land. We traveled for hundreds of
miles in the open bush in safari vehicles and saw literally hundreds of
thousands of animals. The land in East Africa is very different than
what we experienced in southern Africa on our trip to South Africa,
Botswana and Zambia. It varies from high mountain rain forest to flat
open plains. The wildlife is diverse and in the Serengeti we observed
the Great Migration of plains animals that is the largest concentration
of mammalian animals in the world. We saw lines of Wildebeest that
stretched from horizon to horizon. We capped our trip off with a beach
vacation on the exotic island of Zanzibar, which was a great way to
unwind after two weeks of life in the bush.
This web journal chronicles our trip as we traveled to different locations, from our arrival in Arusha to our departure from Dar es Salaam. It discusses our activities at each location as well as providing photo slideshows and galleries of the area and its wildlife.
A complete photo gallery of high resolution images of our entire trip is available on Flickr. Thank you for visiting our site. (Click on map fro
interactive Google map) |
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Photography The focus of this trip was photography of the African wildlife and for the photographers reading this, I thought I'd speak to some of the photographic considerations of the trip. In order to maximize the images, it was important to take the right gear. For this trip, I took the following gear:
When photographing wildlife in Africa it is important to have the ability to cover the entire range of lens focal lengths, from wide angle for landscapes to super telephoto to capture wildlife at a distance. It is important also to have at least one camera with good high ISO performance like the D700. There are many situations in which the light is low and shooting telephoto requires fast shutter speeds. With a mobile safari in the bush there is a lot of dust which means it is preferable to minimize changing lenses to prevent dirt getting on the sensor of a digital SLR camera. The best way to do this is to use multiple camera body-lens combination to cover wide angle, medium telephoto and super telephoto. Using all of this gear presents some real logistical problems and it is really important to have a good quality bag that can accommodate all the equipment and protect it from the elements. On this trip we traveled through the bush in specialized 4 wheel drive vehicles that had roof hatches that made it possible to shoot out of. With three separate camera-lens combinations, it was important to keep them at hand to catch every opportunity, but also protect them from jostling in the vehicle while traversing the rough bush tracks and also the dust. For that I used soft padded pouches. Photographic opportunities varied from animals at a distance requiring the supertelephoto lens (used the bean bag to support that), to animals rubbing up against the vehicles requiring very wide angle focal lengths. Mobile safari challenges all of your photographic skills and equipment, but the images it allows you to capture are fantastic. Over the three weeks we were in Africa I shot over 10,000 images. I shoot everything in Nikon raw format which requires processing every image individually. It took approxiamtely 9 months for me to get all the images processed and culled with a final count of 4500 keepers. Alot of work, but worth it to this photographer. |
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