Photo Tips: Wildlife Photography

I'm not an expert photographer but I've had a bit of experience with wildlife photography in Australia, North America, Southern Africa and Europe now so I thought I'd go through my equipment for this trip, how I shoot & process and add as many tips along the way as I can.  While I'll try and keep it fairly general I'll probably be focusing on our African Safaris.

Okavango Delta and Morami, Botswana

The Okavango Delta is somewhere Jackie and I had been looking forward to for a long time and was actually the primary goal of time in Africa. However things didn't quite turn out the way we had planned...

Our African safaris were one of the first parts of this trip that we found and booked in so that we could time our flights properly, which was great, till our Botswana safari fell through.  This resulting in much scrambling and searching while we were away in North America till we found another group safari on dates that fitted with our flights and was within our budget (which was, admittedly, not very high).  As it turned out, we were the only ones on the trip which was a little weird but also had some perks.

Chobe National Park, Botswana

Chobe is a national park in North East Botswana (and the name of a river on its border) that is world famous for amazing wildlife.  We stayed a couple of nights in Kasane and were lucky enough to have three trips into Chobe, two as game drives and one as a boat trip.  We saw heaps of amazing wildlife but here are a few highlights.

Bomani Tented Camp, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

Bomani Tented Camp is in the south of Hwange National Park, and it is remote. To get there, we had to take a their tram, which they run on the colonial-era rail tracks built by some bloke with a great vision of trains running from South Africa to Egypt but who didn't count on the post-colonial administration taking the particular turn that it has done so the tracks are not in great shape now. Useful for us though!

More early mornings, more safari drives, more lists with lots of commas or again I could just tell a couple of stories.

The Hide, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

Elephant: "Hello!"

Okay, so this is where the blog posts have the potential to get really boring. You see, I could tell you about how we got up really early and went for a drive, had a siesta, then went for another drive. I could write a really long list with lots and lots of commas (and I do like commas) with all the animals that we saw. But really, you just want to scroll down and see the photos (in fact you might already have done that).

Before you do though, let me tell you just a couple of stories from our stay at The Hide in Hwange National Park.

Chundu Island, Zimbabwe

Chundu Island is a little (very little) island in the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe. They run on solar power and tank water. They have no internet. There is apparently one spot where you can sometimes get phone reception if you hold your phone up in the air. And somehow, from this island, a lovely couple, one Zimbabwean, one originally British, run a lovely safari camp.