Africa Trip Day Six
After a very restful sleep on the houseboat, I was up at 5:30 to enjoy and warm shower and be ready for the long day ahead. No hot water! I learned later that the hot water is only turned on in the afternoon/early evening 🤦♂️. I must have missed that part during our onboarding briefing. Anyway, I brought lots of body wipes for this trip so I thoroughly wiped down and went upstairs to the lounge area for a much needed coffee. By 6:30am we were on the boat and heading to Lily Land. If you watched the video opening this story, you will have already received a taste of this beautiful outlet of the Chobe River on the Namibian side. It is rare to find places like this along the river because elephants love to eat these plants, but for some reason elephants are not around the area. It’s probably due to this being an agricultural area with farmland and lots of cattle so it’s likely the farmers do what they can to keep the elephants (and other wildlife, especially predators) away. Namibia doesn’t have the same strict controls and enforcement that Botswana has. In addition, it seems only Pangolin Photo Safaris goes to this isolated location so we had it to ourselves. This was a birders paradise! A constant stream of amazing photo opportunities, and I went a little crazy. During our 2+ hours there, I ended up taking close to 10,000 photos. I had my camera setup for 50 frames per second (FPS) during most that time, so the numbers added up quickly. After returning, I made some changes to my camera setup and reduced the maximum FPS to just 25 and made a note for the remaining days to use the maximum mode only when appropriate. It took my a LONG time to cull that morning’s output. There are so many wonderful photos from this morning but I realised while putting this together I took very little video this morning (and the afternoon outing as well), so my intro video relied extensively on photos. Here are just a few shots from this morning at Lily Land.
After returning to the Voyager, we had a nice lunch and had a 3 hour break before heading back out on the photo boat where the focus would be on the larger animals with an amazing sunset as the backdrop. While I got some great photos of hippos, elephants, and giraffes, the highlight (literally) was spending time with the baboons whose fur was on fire with the setting sun, setting up amazing rim light opportunties. I underexposed heavily, between 2-3 stops, which made the background dark, the main body dark, but the fur surrounding the animal was very bright outlining the animal so you can tell what it is even without the details in the body. I love this technique and was one of my favorite techniques I took from this trip. After dark, we returned to the Voyager enjoyed a delicious dinner and then the photo host provided a presentation and lesson on how to make more creative photos. This included the rim light technique, but also high key (see hippo photo below), silhouette (see guinea fowl below), dark side (see both elephant and Darter photo below) and more. It was around 9:30 by this time, and I was ready to sleep, BUT had to move photos to computer and backup (paranoia still intact). Tomorrow will be more photo boat time and focusing on large animals.
