Safari photo tips
As we were going through our safari adventure in Etosha, I kept contemplating what worked well and what I’d do differently next time. These are my notes.
Animals
- Do game drives
- First couple times I was in Africa I thought: the guide has a car full of people that aren’t me, I have a car, I’ll just use mine, be more flexible and save some money
- My mistake: The guide does this for a living, they know the animal patterns and can find animals better than you
- Kids: Game drives in Etosha don’t allow kids under 6yo, luckily our daughter was stunningly well behaved and the guides flexible, so with the exception of Okaukuejo camp, we were allowed on game drives with no issues
- Go early or go late
- This is probably the most common safari advice, for a good reason
- It’s too hot during the day, so most animals are active early in the morning or late in the evening
- Bonus: the light is amazing!
- Look for shade
- Predators like to relax in the shade
- At every waterhole, make it a habit to scan under any nice shady trees nearby
- The guides tend to know the best spots in their area, so see bullet 1 and do game drives
- Take your time
- Found a lion pride, took your photos, off to the next waterhole?
- Consider staying and following your subjects for a while, maybe they’ll do something interesting
Gear
One of the often repeated advice on digital photography is saving money on bodies and investing that money into lens. That sadly does not apply to wildlife photography. There, both the body and the lens becomes important. Specifically, you want a high resolution sensor for crop, but also fast readout with high FPS so you can capture the best moments.
- Bring a 2nd body
- As a backup if your main camera dies
- Less lens-switching helps prevent dust
- Faster reactions when there’s action going on, no need to change lens
- >600mm is where it’s at
- I almost brought just 70-200mm with a 2x teleconverter
- Luckily my wife managed to get the just-released Nikon Z 180-600mm
- Result: My most frequently used focal length while in Etosha was 600mm
- Of all the photos I took, 95% were in the 180-600mm range and 63% were specifically at 600mm
- Zoom helps, long prime would work too, but I’d have missed some great shots
- Yes, but: Zooms don’t typically have the nicest bokeh and bushes form most of the background in Etosha, so prime would probably make nice photos
- What would I do differently: Try to get an even longer lens or get a teleconverter
- FPS counts
- One of the secrets to getting great wildlife shots is getting a ton of shots to begin with, and then selecting that perfect shot where the animal’s expression is the best
- Don’t be afraid to click like crazy and take more photos than you think you should
- Yes, but: This will require a lot of storage, especially at 45MP - I took 20,000 photos, 1.1TB worth of data
- Resolution counts
- I shot 45MP, but cropped almost all photos for composition and “zoom” reasons.
- Should I use a DX mode? No
- You don’t know how you’ll want to crop the final image and it’s always better to have more image to work with
- Yes, but: If you need to save storage space or your camera can do DX at higher FPS then FX, it may still be a reasonable tradeoff
- Silent shutter
- Nikon Z9 got away with a mechanical shutter, but has the ability to play shutter sounds as a form of audible feedback
- I initially enabled those, but over time I learnt to shoot in complete silence to avoid distracting the animals
- Turns out it’s actually very freeing, give it a try!
- Bonus: You won’t be “that guy” on game drives and everyone can peacefully soak in the environment without being distracted by your shutter’s rapid fire
- Yes, but: The guides use the shutter clicks as an indication that you’re still taking photos and they shouldn’t drive off, now you’ll need to tell them