Return to Africa

A question frequently asked is, "Can an exotic adventure be as good the second time?" My answer is a blunt, "Yes!"

Kruger-3041Kruger-3041

After our two month visit to South Africa in 2017 we had the opportunity to return for a longer visit in the spring 2018. We broke all of the travel rules I suggested previously and made last minute plans for our extended trip. We planned to re-visit the highlights of our previous trip, spend more time in our favorite places, and visit new areas on the south and west coasts of this amazing country.  As always, we wanted to combine adventure, relaxing vacation time, and wildlife photography in a variety of national parks all at a reasonable cost.

The adventure began flying from Jackson, Wyoming, to Salt Lake City, Amsterdam, and, finally, Cape Town, South Africa. We arrived in time to see the famous Cape Town bicycle race with about 30,000 riders and all of the amazing sights of the city on the cape. From there we drove south and were able to stay in one of only 3 cabins inside of Cape Point National Park. The Druiker cabin gave us access to the park when it was closed to visitors and a sneak preview of free roaming wildlife and empty hiking trails to Cape Point. It was a whole different way to see the park and its pristine beaches.

From Cape Point we traveled east along the south coast scenic highway and eventually, the Garden Route National Park. Here we found many broad regions of the park that we missed in our previous 3 days at Tsitsikama and the Storms River Mouth region of the park. Again, we were greeted with scenic vistas and gorgeous uninhabited beaches. We relaxed, hiked, and unwound from the long trip and slowed our minds to African time.

From the Garden Route we headed quickly to Addo Elephant National Park north of Port Elizabeth. This was one of our favorite spots last year and we wanted more days to explore and wanted to spend more time in the less visited southern half of the park.  Addo is a hidden gem of SA – very few visitors and huge numbers of wildlife. It was common to see more than 200 elephants every day (some very close up) and also herds of Cape buffalo, red hartabeast, bontebok, occasional kudu, ostrich, secretary birds, and even a caracal cat, honey badger, and a black rhino. Knowing the roads and wildlife locations made this second visit even more fantastic than the first. If you visit SA, don't miss Addo.

Addo was our eastern most point of the coast drive and after 5 days we meandered back west along the coast and through the mountains. We were able to spend more time in amazing B&Bs as we hiked and learned the history of the southwest region of SA. After our time along the Indian Ocean we headed to the West Coast National Park north of Cape Town. We were rewarded with beautiful hiking and beaches extending as far as you could see. While we saw some birds including hundreds of flamingos and spoonbills and other wildlife, the West Coast NP is known primarily for its fields of wild flowers. We were there in the SA autumn and so had to only imagine the beauty across the rolling hills.

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As we did last year, we saved the highlight for the end of our visit and flew to Johannesburg to pick up a small camper and drive 4 hours east to Kruger National Park. Our plan this year was to spend a full month in the park and visit new rest camps in the southern two-thirds of the park.  The vastness of Kruger is hard to envision – twice the size of Yellowstone with more than 4 times the roads and a tiny, tiny fraction of the people.

We learned previously that camping in Kruger is quite different than in North America. Since everything is self-contained in the little 7M camper, it works best to move to a different camp each night and avoid back and forth drives. We started in our favorite camp at Crocodile Bridge in the south and spent several days back and forth to the Lower Sabie camp about 30 miles to the north. This area has the highest concentration and variety of wildlife from large predators to the giant herbivores to various ungulates. We were rewarded by amazing and unique sightings every single day.

Over the next 3 weeks we wandered through the southern and central regions of the Kruger and were fortunate to see dozens of big cats, African wild dogs, jackals and hyenas. We saw hundreds of large herbivores and thousands of ungulates. Each and every critter was special in its own way and the entire visit was yet another trip of a lifetime. Yes, you can go back and have an amazing experience. What are you waiting for?

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Working in 16 Bit Mode

Memory is Cheap — Memories are Priceless!

I typically shoot in 14 bit and process in 16 bit in Photoshop as long as I can. Here’s why…

16 Bit Clobber and Recovery

The issue is not what you can see, or what your monitor can display, or what your printer can print—but what is under the hood of the file! I believe you will be amazed by the examples! (For this article, 8 bit vs 16 bit refers to Color Bit Depth while using Lightroom and Photoshop.)

14 Bit Capture 16 Bit Image

16 Bit Export

The image above was captured with a Nikon D810 in 14 bit mode. I set that in the camera’s menus long ago and never looked back! The files are much larger, so they fill cards faster, fill the buffer quicker, and possibly slow down the frame rate on some cameras. You might consider these issues up front. You can always “downgrade” a capture during your workflow, but you can’t “upgrade” one. As seen in the screen grab, I export images from Lightroom to Photoshop by selecting the 16 bits/component option. Continue reading “Working in 16 Bit Mode”

A quick note about photography gear for South Africa

A big frustration about long distance travel to exotic regions is always – what gear to bring. For our 2 month trip I bought a new larger pro backpack. The pack allowed me to bring all of my photography gear and laptop, card reader and a 4T external hard drive in the pack.

Kruger-3102-EditKruger-3102-Edit


I brought 3 bodies – a full frame Canon 5D3, a crop sensor Canon 7D, and a full frame Sony A7R2 with a Metabones IV adapter to Canon lenses. I had at least 3 extra batteries and a charger for each body. I had a series of CF and SD memory cards with capacities from 16 gB (too small) to 128 gB each. I used all of the CF cards because of the number of shots with the 7D which uses only a CF card and had extra SD capacity. I brought a tripod for night shots and kept it in my checked luggage on the plane – never took it out of its carrying bag. I had both lens and sensor cleaning gear and ended up using only a blower for external lens dust.

I took many lenses and used only 3. I brought a 8mm fish-eye for fun, a 17-40mm wide-angle, a 100mm macro, and a 70-200 f/2.8, a 1.4x converter and used none of these lenses. I brought a series of ND and polarizing filters and used none of these. What I did use was a 24-70mm f/2.8 for wide shots on the 5D3, a 100-400mm for tele shots on the 7D, and a 28mm f/2 on the Sony for walking around in the cities. I never changed a single lens – even once (and never got dust on any sensor.) You could correctly argue that I didn't use the creative capacity of my lenses and other gear but I was consumed with finding and observing wildlife and really never had (or took?) the time to use the other gear. Over 85% of my shots were with the 100-400 on the 7D and about 15% split between the other two body/lens combinations. We were up every single morning between 5 and 5:30 and usually to bed by 9 PM and I was simply too tired for creative night shots – lazy, I guess.

Finally, a word about work flow while traveling. I tried to do nightly downloads to my laptop of all camera memory cards. All images were imported as copies with custom presets that did routine noise reduction, sharpening, added some clarity and vibrance, and adjusted the luminance for good dynamic range. Raw images were converted to DNG files on import and full-size previews were created. I added basic location key words on import. Most of this occurred while I was taking my evening shower. I tried, when possible, to do a quick scan through all of the day's images to make sure there were no systematic capture errors or camera malfunctions and added additional subject key words and geotaged their general location. When I had time I would optimize exposures on large groups of similar images using the synchronization tool in Lightroom. When we had wifi in the south of the country, I would try to do some first-round editing of a couple of images so I could post them to Facebook. There was no wifi or any internet access in Kruger or Mapungubwe so I didn't try to edit or crop images there.

I backed up my Lightroom catalog with every download to the laptop with an extra copy to a USB thumb drive always in my pocket. I did a full backup of the images and catalog to the external hard drive every couple of nights so that I had 3 copies of every image stored 3 places in the camper (in Kruger and Mapungubwe) or the car/B&B while in the south. This arrangement is far from perfect as all of the storage could have been stolen, damaged or even lost but I am happy to say that I didn't lose a single image from any of the 3 sites of storage.

Flying to South Africa I had my camera bag with me as carry-on in the airplane. Returning to the US I was forced to check the laptop in my luggage so I was not able to do any work during the 30+ hours to get home. To my great dismay, I was forced to check my entire camera bag in Doha, Qatar because of new TSA rules limiting electronics to nothing larger than a cell phone. I was able to place my external hard drive in my pocket and carry it during the flights home. Qatar Airlines did a wonderful job of double sealing the backpack, marking and hand-carrying it to the plane, and finally, hand-delivering it to me at US customs in Dallas.

Everything was covered for full-cost replacement by a rider on my home insurance for domestic and foreign travel. Piece of mind is a wonderful thing.

 

A quick note about photography gear for South Africa

A big frustration about long distance travel to exotic regions is always – what gear to bring. For our 2 month trip I bought a new larger pro backpack. The pack allowed me to bring all of my photography gear and laptop, card reader and a 4T external hard drive in the pack.

Kruger-3102-EditKruger-3102-Edit


I brought 3 bodies – a full frame Canon 5D3, a crop sensor Canon 7D, and a full frame Sony A7R2 with a Metabones IV adapter to Canon lenses. I had at least 3 extra batteries and a charger for each body. I had a series of CF and SD memory cards with capacities from 16 gB (too small) to 128 gB each. I used all of the CF cards because of the number of shots with the 7D which uses only a CF card and had extra SD capacity. I brought a tripod for night shots and kept it in my checked luggage on the plane – never took it out of its carrying bag. I had both lens and sensor cleaning gear and ended up using only a blower for external lens dust.

I took many lenses and used only 3. I brought a 8mm fish-eye for fun, a 17-40mm wide-angle, a 100mm macro, and a 70-200 f/2.8, a 1.4x converter and used none of these lenses. I brought a series of ND and polarizing filters and used none of these. What I did use was a 24-70mm f/2.8 for wide shots on the 5D3, a 100-400mm for tele shots on the 7D, and a 28mm f/2 on the Sony for walking around in the cities. I never changed a single lens – even once (and never got dust on any sensor.) You could correctly argue that I didn't use the creative capacity of my lenses and other gear but I was consumed with finding and observing wildlife and really never had (or took?) the time to use the other gear. Over 85% of my shots were with the 100-400 on the 7D and about 15% split between the other two body/lens combinations. We were up every single morning between 5 and 5:30 and usually to bed by 9 PM and I was simply too tired for creative night shots – lazy, I guess.

Finally, a word about work flow while traveling. I tried to do nightly downloads to my laptop of all camera memory cards. All images were imported as copies with custom presets that did routine noise reduction, sharpening, added some clarity and vibrance, and adjusted the luminance for good dynamic range. Raw images were converted to DNG files on import and full-size previews were created. I added basic location key words on import. Most of this occurred while I was taking my evening shower. I tried, when possible, to do a quick scan through all of the day's images to make sure there were no systematic capture errors or camera malfunctions and added additional subject key words and geotaged their general location. When I had time I would optimize exposures on large groups of similar images using the synchronization tool in Lightroom. When we had wifi in the south of the country, I would try to do some first-round editing of a couple of images so I could post them to Facebook. There was no wifi or any internet access in Kruger or Mapungubwe so I didn't try to edit or crop images there.

I backed up my Lightroom catalog with every download to the laptop with an extra copy to a USB thumb drive always in my pocket. I did a full backup of the images and catalog to the external hard drive every couple of nights so that I had 3 copies of every image stored 3 places in the camper (in Kruger and Mapungubwe) or the car/B&B while in the south. This arrangement is far from perfect as all of the storage could have been stolen, damaged or even lost but I am happy to say that I didn't lose a single image from any of the 3 sites of storage.

Flying to South Africa I had my camera bag with me as carry-on in the airplane. Returning to the US I was forced to check the laptop in my luggage so I was not able to do any work during the 30+ hours to get home. To my great dismay, I was forced to check my entire camera bag in Doha, Qatar because of new TSA rules limiting electronics to nothing larger than a cell phone. I was able to place my external hard drive in my pocket and carry it during the flights home. Qatar Airlines did a wonderful job of double sealing the backpack, marking and hand-carrying it to the plane, and finally, hand-delivering it to me at US customs in Dallas.

Everything was covered for full-cost replacement by a rider on my home insurance for domestic and foreign travel. Piece of mind is a wonderful thing.