Phil Holden Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
Regarding the light. Shooting in the morning, when most of my good shots were taken, had a wonderful soft look that the prints capture nicely. Half way through the dry season and the landscape becomes very harsh away from water and everything is dry and very dusty and you get to see that in the landscape shots. I think I lost something on the jpg conversation as the images look not quite as nice as my psd’s do.
Regarding equipment.
- Weight. Opinions differ on this. Some people have told me it’s literally everything you own and others say that you can get away with carrying camera gear. I played it safe, I made sure my body+lens+camera bag were all under. I did carry camera batteries in my shooting vest but that was about it. Not sure where you are staying, but I found that I could wash clothes almost everywhere and only took a couple pair of pants, t-shirts etc and washed them every few days. I wasn’t exactly a fashion show, but there would have been serious tears if I couldn’t get on the plane without my gear. One of my hardest decisions was camera bags, as when you weigh them they really add up the weight. That took me many visits to the Glazers our local store trying many combinations.
- Storage+power. Yeah, I bought the flashtrax 80gb. I thought long and hard between that and the Epson, as much as the screen is amazing the 40 gb limit was really worrying me. I took along my http://www.digitalcamerabattery.com that I bought last year for some winter Yellowstone shooting and took this along. I used this with the screen of my d2x to delete obviously bad images and then powered the flashtrax with the bigger battery. Basically saved my smaller batteries for being in the field. In terms of power, it gets hard some times. There are a bunch of solar panels that you might investigate, get the flexible ones. We went days without a power source and often the car cigarette socket doesn’t work. Take a UK plug and make sure your power boxes work with 240volts. I stupidly fried my digitalcamerabattery power supply in the one place that we had power ~ not smart!
- Lens. My personal view would be that you should take 70-200 and the longer one if you can. At f5.6 you will be really struggling, even if the 80-400 has VR/IS etc unless you dial up the ISO, which depending what camera can be problematic at times. Also, should you get to witness any action my experience with my old 80-400 was not good on focusing quickly. Make sure you have a good strong mono pod and get to your local zoo before you live to practice with the new gear. I hadn’t shot any wildlife for ages and it too me a while to get into that mode.
Then to answer Rocco
- Walking safari's are just amazing, such a different experience from being in the car. You would often start out early, 6am when it was cold and you would have multiple layers on. Come 10am it was HOT and you had removed most of it, strapping it to my pack. I pretty much took all my gear and suffered when it was hot. I carried one of the bigger lenses on the body with my monopod as you wanted to have it ready should you see something quick and the rest in the bag. If you are interested there is a little write up of my interpretation of our first walking safari @ "http://spaces.msn.com/members/philholden/Blog/cns!1pqdthAqyXPGyArXrM8wrbiA!383.entry" (sorry, url doesn't embed for some reason, you will have to copy/paste manually)
- Regarding where I stayed. In South Lunagwa we were at Kafunta River Lodge and then a small bush camp down south. I loved my experience and the people at Kafunta are really great.
- Night safari’s. Here I’m a little mixed. It’s a great experience, and you do get to see stuff that you wouldn’t see in day light. But apart from a documentary point of view the images aren’t exactly your typical photographic image that you would expect from Africa. I’ve attached a lone Leopold as it just walked past our truck and you can see what I mean. Not exactly natural! But, it was the only time I got to see this beautiful creature on this trip and wouldn’t have missed it at all. Net-net, my POV – its part of the experience, enjoy it, but don’t expect fab images!
|