While driving into Chobe National Park, we were gawking at the numerous elephants along the roadside and almost missed this sight. Luckily, one of my travel buddies spotted it. It’s called a sable antelope and stood motionless in the bushes, just watching us until we moved on.
My first tie on elephant-back safari was on my first trip to Africa in 2011. We went in Zambia. The elephants all have a handler assigned to them from when they’re babies. This little guy was in training, happily trundling along next to its mother. You can see her shadow on the ground where he’s standing.
If you’ve ever wondered what a giraffe looks like, they look like this. This guy struck a pose as if it was in a children’s book of animals.
As we waited to go on our boat safari in Botswana, the waiting area of our safari operators filled with Japanese tourists. When we were told to head to the boat we managed to take off in front of the crowd. When we saw the boat we noticed it was a double decker and decided we definitely wanted to secure a spot up top. Unfortunately, they’d reserved the upper deck for the tour group so that they could all hear the translator. As a result, we were stuck to the bottom. As it turned out, we were the only three on the bottom. Apart from getting hit in the head by a lens cap dropped from the upper deck, it was actually great. It was like we had our own private boat and guide for a few hours.
I snapped this shot from the lower deck, of a mama hippo and her baby.
I’m writing this from an interesting location tonight, perched on top of a rock at the far end of Horseshoe Bay, Bermuda. I’m making use of the Digicel Hotspot here while shooting a timelapse. I took the photo to the right on my Blackberry, a few hours ago.
I decided to timelapse Horseshoe as the time moves from early evening to night. It was a beautiful sunset tonight. Unfortunately, I think I overexposed the whole thing. Not too bad though, I can come back here again. Assuming I find a way down off this rock.
Well… they do!!
There’s no trickery involved in today’s shot like the one from a few days ago of two giraffes grazing in Botswana.
We’d come through rain, a lot of rain, to get to this spot. Soaking wet, pools of water collected in my guide-provided poncho. We came round a corner to discover about twenty giraffe, spread across a broad flat landscape. I carefully pulled my camera from beneath he puddle-filled poncho, spilling water all over my travel buddies in the process, and began to fire away.
When I saw these two giraffe, I knew exactly what I wanted. Both of them with their heads up, pointing towards the center of the photo. I didn’t actually manage to get this in the same photo. So when it came to producing this image, I wound up using two sets of bracketed photos. So I had two with regular exposure, two at -2 and two at +2.
I used Photomatix’s ghosting removal tool to pick the images of each giraffe I wanted and voila, the image I had in my head in Africa was now on my screen in Bermuda.
We spotted this guy on our way to safari in Botswana’s Chobe National Park. We were driving along a paved road prior to turning off onto the dirt tracks we’d spend the next few hours exploring. All of a sudden, the paved road became lined by elephants, munching away, not the least bit bothered by all the cars driving past.
I could spend days on end watching the penguins waddle about at Boulders Bay. These two had left the masses on the beach for a higher local atop the boulders. The one on the right seemed to be battling with a bit of an itch.
These giraffe were amongst about twenty that we came across in the Chobe National Park, Botswana.
I thought this little baby penguin with a pink heart painted on his chest was fitting for today. He lives on Boulder’s Bay, in Simonstown, South Africa, along with a colony of African Penguins. They used to be called Jackass Penguins because of the noise they make.
No other penguins were marked like this, so I really have no idea why he’s got this little heart painted on him.
