Emergence

The sun has just set after another blissful day in this piece of remote wilderness.

In front of me is a life-giving waterhole in a harsh land, where a myriad of animals came to quench their thirst during the heat of the day...

One animal was still thirsty, though, and for some reason he had waited until everyone was gone and he could have the waterhole to himself.

I first notice him emerging from the treeline behind me...a phantom in the dusk light.
He takes note of the human presence in his path, and swerves slightly to make his way around my position towards the water. He is an experienced old warrior, the signs of many battles etched on his face and in his ears.

He sports a defense weapon that is in high demand by certain misinformed members of my species - and that makes him a constant target. Does he know this?? I doubt it. At least in this remote corner of Africa, he is safe at this particular moment as I am watching him approach, watching him emerge from the shadows...

As he scuffles towards the water, dust kicked up lingers, and all the way he seems to be "emerging" from the dust and the fading light, like a ghostly apparition. He moves very quietly for an animal of his bulk and stature...

The light is gone. I can barely make out his shape. I dial in a very slow shutter speed to limit my ISO to within the 4000-6400 band, which I know my camera can handle with aplomb.

Nikon D3s  |  Nikkor 500mm f4 VR-II  |  f4.0  |  1/60 SS  |  ISO-4500

I grab a few photos, being careful to pan lightly with him as he moves (given my slow shutter speed). Then I put the camera down and enjoy the moment. So many wildlife photographers these days forget to merely enjoy the moment, being so caught up in grabbing that "winning photo". 

We need to admire once again what drove us to take cameras on safari in the first place...
We need to maintain our respect for the natural world, instead of pushing too deeply into the natural rhythms and disturbing out subjects for "the shot"...
We need to view our subjects like we first viewed them, through the eyes of awestruck children...

We need to emerge as a driving force in raising awareness for the wildlife we love photographing, and to do that, we need to let go of our narcissism and egos...

Morkel Erasmus

Floodplains of Fantasy

You've heard me rant and rave about Mana Pools a couple of times. Words fail to describe the wonder and ethereal beauty of the place...but somehow so do the majority of photos taken there. Why is that?

Is it because photos are 2D, and the Mana Pools experience is immersive, holistic and overpowers all the dimensions you perceive and the senses you use to perceive them??

Is it because you feel so insignificant in this wilderness, that you actually feel that God made it too beautiful to capture perfectly on camera, so that you feel you have to return regularly to drink the beauty and the wilderness in??

I believe that these statements above are true...

On my previous visits, I refrained from trying my hand at wide-angle landscapes, mostly because I felt part of the beauty and allure lies in the trees, and to get a real sense of the forests on the Zambezi floodplains you typically need a longer focal length to add compression to the scene. Something like this...

Nikon Df  |  Nikkor 80-400mm VR-II @ 175mm  |  f11  |  1/500 SS  |  ISO-1100

The other problem is that I actually visit this place for the wonderful wildlife encounters you can have here, as well as the total disconnect from modern life and the rat race. The best time to do this is the dry season - meaning (like in most of Southern Africa) that the skies will be cloudless most of the time. This year, I hosted a Wild Eye photo safari to Mana Pools in early September, a little later than my previous visits...for one thing there was a LOT of haze during the first 2 days due to incessant fires on both the Zimbabwean and Zambian side of the Zambezi river. Luckily, a constant wind on our 3rd day blew all the haze to someplace far away, and we had 2 more days of nice clear skies. Our final afternoon, though, was a real treat for the landscape photographer that's hidden beneath all this wildlife bravado...high clouds.

Those of you who photograph sunrises and sunsets regularly know that high clouds are often an indicator of a wonderful sunset. The problem in Mana is that the sun sets behind the mountains on the Zambian escarpment, so you have no idea whether there are clouds on the distant horizon that will block those last magical rays of red sunlight that inflame high clouds like a rampant viral outbreak.

During our last drinks stop, some of my guests wanted to photograph the lovely trees on a certain stretch of the river close to the Trichilia campsite with wide angle lenses, and I was only too happy to join them. Like it so often does, the light on the high clouds looked to pop, then fizzled...and just as I was beginning to pack up the tripod - the sunset exploded!

Now, like I said earlier, I'd never really been able to get a composition that did the trees and all the elements of the landscape justice. For me, a landscape photo taken in Mana Pools needs to convey a real sense of the place...the massive trees (and I do mean massive), the barren earth with its termite mounds sparsely spread between those trees, an elephant (okay for a wide angle landscape shot this would be a long shot), the sparkle of the broad waters of the Zambezi river, and the rising escarpment in Zambia...the ideal Mana Pools landscape photo needs to take you there, especially people who have been there. It doesn't matter if you went once as a child 80 years ago or if you fervently make a near-religious pilgrimage to Mana, once you've been there, an ideal Mana Pools photo should transport you there in an instant.

During this particular sunset, I found a couple of compositions that I feel does this. This photo is the result of manually blending 3 different exposures to get the look and feel that I was after. I wanted it to convey the detail my eye saw in the tree trunks and the distant landscape, while still capturing that magical sunset colour and light. By using the main tree as a frame for the image, I think I have conveyed something of the size of these trees: like Ents of Middle-Earth the rise up and watch over the floodplains. These trees are called Faidherbia Albida, or Winterthorn, or Ana trees...and the pods that lie on the ground are a staple food in the dry months for all the herbivores that roam these floodplains.

Here are the settings, and please do yourself a favour and CLICK on the photo so you can view it against a DARK background (this way it really comes to life), and also so you can view it at a slightly higher resolution. It's worth it...

Techs:
Nikon D800
Nikkor 14-24mm f2.8 @ 14mm
f8.0  |  ISO-200

What do you think? This spot is incidentally close to where I photographed THIS elephant 2 days prior...

I think I will probably have to return and get a better one...well, I am using that as an excuse as I really will return. Every year, I will return, as long as I am able to do so...and I will try and share the wonder of this place with as many people as I can, as long as I am able to do so.

Thank you for reading my ramblings. Have a blessed day, friends!

Morkel Erasmus

A Day in Mana Pools

I mince no bones about the fact that I absolutely love Mana Pools.
It is currently (and will probably remain for a long time) my favourite safari destination in Africa.

This is an older post of mine over on the Wild Eye Photo Chat blog, describing how a potential day on safari with us in Mana Pools might go. Just looking at it again makes me yearn to be back there!

You can read the original post, with plenty of eye candy in the form of photos, HERE.
You can also find out more information about joining me in Mana Pools on a safari ini 2014 HERE.

Have a great day, friends...

Morkel Erasmus

How to Cheetah your way through the Kalahari...

You've got to love the unpredictability of a day on safari. I've had so many experiences where you go through an entire day without seeing anything of note...without seeing anything dramatic or unique. On those days you have to focus on other things - like the privilege of actually BEING in an unspoiled piece of wilderness instead of a bustling city office. Yet so often the very next day can yield more drama than you can handle...

The Kalahari - where your tired soul can find rest, red sand and respite...

Hi everyone...

As promised, I've got a lot of catching up to do on trips I've done in the past year!

In September 2009 we were fortunate enough to go on a marvellous 8-day trip to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in South Africa. This unique National Park straddles the border between South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, and you can actually enter it from either of these countries.

The Kalahari is a funny place...if you've never been there, you wonder what makes people go back there time after time and can't figure out what the hype is about. But - if you've been there - you keep finding your heart aching to get back there, gaze upon its red sand and endless skies, and drink in the thundering silence.

The sunsets were just fantastic - glorious splashes of light falling onto a piece of earth that reflects it beautifully.

The first clouds of spring rain were building up during one morning of our trip, but unfortunately for the fauna and flora it never really rained that week - although the turbulent clouds made for some dramatic contrasts against the red sand and golden grass...

The cornerstone of life in the Kalahari is the Camelthorn tree...this tree provides life and sustenance and much-needed soil minerals to many of the animals which call this arid semi-desert home. You will see it standing solitary against a dune in the photo above, and also in the shot below as the road leads you between two of them.

As you can see in these photos - the clouds can be really something in the Kalahari...and as a landscape photographer this really helps you fill the frame with elements that engage the viewer's eye, and in some cases, serve as leading lines to lead you through the image.

At sunrise and sunset the clouds also help to capture and reflect that sweet golden light that every photographer hunts after. This sunrise shot was taken early one morning behind our tent:

The beauty about HDR photography is that it's not limited to only landscape shots for example...I have and am still continuing to explore new ways to apply this to the kind of shots I find myself taking. My first love photographically has always been wildlife - and it was only obvious that I should start dabbling with wildlife HDR shots.

As an example - here is a shot taken on the dunes in the Kgalagadi one evening as the sun set behind a herd of grazing oryx.

As this blog progresses I will show you more of what I mean when applying this to different areas of photography such as wildlife photography...

Thanks for reading, and keep watching this space...! :)

Morkel