Camping on the Skeleton Coast

This is the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. Actually, technically, the Skeleton Coast National Park is a little bit to the north of here. Where we are now is just this vast sea of dunes right next to the coast, a little bit south of Valvespey. And it's a huge area here that goes all the way down the coast of Namibia, where the dunes run up to the sea. This particular part that we're in is very protected. You can only enter here with particular permits. And the guys that I'm working with here, Hogard and Yandere, they spent years trying to build this operation where they can bring photo groups in here to this incredible landscape. And we're actually the first photo tour group that's ever actually come in here to shoot these scenes. Now, it's an absolutely breathtaking place. The dunes here go on and on forever. And right in front of me, there's an old shipwreck from the 1970s. It's just a rusted tug that's been here about 50 years. What we're gonna do in a few minutes is go down there, shoot it in the sunset, and then later on in the morning, when the Milky Way comes over, the Milky Way's gonna set at five o'clock in the morning just behind the tug. So we're gonna get up and shoot the Milky Way. And it's just such an absolutely incredible place here. Being here in a place like this, it's just mind-blowing. It's a highlight to what's been just an awesome week traveling through Namibia. So the only way to get in here is with four-by-fours, and the only way to stay here is in tents. So we've come in here with a group of specialized drivers. The people who do this, they drive over these dunes every day so they really know what they're doing. You can't come here on your own. You have to know how to drive on dunes. You have to know how to walk around the tide. And we've also got a camp manager who set up a tent. So just after the sun's gone down, we're gonna cook a barbecue here and sit out and watch the stars, crawl back into the tents, and in the morning, crawl out and watch the Milky Way set, and then the sun come up. We're a couple of hundred kilometers from any other human being. Driving in here, we saw seals bathing in the ocean and bathing on the beach, jackals, pelicans, cormorants, flamingos. It's gonna be a really, really special place to spend the night, and I'm really looking forward to this. So in terms of composition with waterscapes like this, and obviously water is gonna be a massive element of the foreground, and you're gonna be using that to construct the image. Now, right in front of the shipwreck, there was a kind of runoff stream where the waves are coming in, and then it was just running back down the stream, which made for this really obvious leading line. But I thought it was just a little bit heavy in the composition. I wanted to try doing something with the waves, so I kind of stepped to the side, stepped in front of that, and then just shot trying to blur the waves and use the curve of the incoming waves as a leading line. Now, to do this, when there's a little bit of light in the sky, you use a neutral density filter. So I was using a case six-stop neutral density filter here to give me about half a second, which gives you just a nice amount of blur, but doesn't blur it too much. If you blur the waves too much, it flattens them out and removes all the dynamism. So usually something like a third of a stop or a half of a stop works really well. Now, at the same time, turning around and looking up the coast, there was also an incredible view, and it's just one of those things that always pays just to keep looking around you and not just be fixated on the one shot in front of you. Because in the other direction, the light was really three-dimensional, just really sculpting the dunes. And then in the foreground, what was happening is that the waves were just coming up over the sand in front of the tripod, and the wet sand was creating these incredible reflections of the sky. And then just after the sun had gone down, we got this incredible sunset. There was really pink light. All the clouds went pink and magenta. It was just wonderful, pleasing tones. Now, at this point, the light was quite low, so I no longer needed a neutral density filter to give myself long exposures. So it's just standing at the edge of the ocean, just waiting for the, watching the waves coming up underneath the tripod, and then just clicking the shutter when there was a nice leading line from the wave. Well, that turned into an absolutely brilliant evening. We came here to shoot the shipwreck that you can see behind me, just this incredible expanse of coast with these dunes running all the way up to the sea. But what we didn't really expect was to have such an amazing sky. Usually here at this time of year, it's winter here now, with the winds blowing from the east, which it had been for the last few days, the sky is just a generally really clear blue. But it's such an incredible location that it really doesn't matter. But to have such an astonishing sunset, and we were able to shoot in both directions, towards the boat, using the ocean and some of these streams as leading lines. And in the other direction, up the coast, the light was just magnificent. The clouds are dappling the light, giving us this kind of interplay of shadow and contrast, which gave the whole scene so much depth. It's just been a pretty special evening. And what we're gonna do now, now the light's getting a little bit lower, let's go and sit, put some meat on the barbecue, and have a drink, celebrate, and then go to bed. Now the following morning, as it turned out, there were too many clouds in the sky for us to be able to shoot astros. So we went back to bed, slept in a little bit, got up, had breakfast, and then packed up the camp, and then just headed over the dunes to the next camp location. And our second camp base was basically on top of a dune, much higher, overlooking the ocean. So it wasn't right next to the beach, like our previous campsite had been, but with the elevation, we could look right along the coast. So as the light level started to get low, we set up the tripods and waited for the really good light to happen. Last night out on the dunes, and this is about as good as a sunset gets when you don't have any clouds in the sky. It's just beautiful here. We're right on the coast. We've got a kind of kink in the line of the coast, so we can look up and have this kind of gentle curve going away from us. And these dunes just receding into the distance, the sunset about five minutes ago. And it's just such a soft, gentle light on the dunes. It's not a high contrast scene with this beautiful graduation of pastel color tones going through the sky. And whichever direction we look, north up the coast, south down the coast, it's just really pretty. And this is a really nice way to finish our time out here in the dunes. Now this turned out to be one of those places that's really, really stunning to be there, but photographing it is actually quite difficult. Finding a way to capture the scene, to capture the essence was quite challenging because first of all, there wasn't a specific focus point. There was no one anchor, no one thing that you could build a composition around, just this lines of dunes kind of receding onto the horizon. So what I worked a lot with is just the lines of the dunes and compressing them with a telephoto and just keeping the compositions really, really simple. Now the best light came about 20 minutes after the sun had gone down. So there's no longer any direct light on the dunes. So you didn't get any hard lines of contrast. And what we had was basically bounce light. So the sky was acting like a giant soft box and bouncing the light off the sun from over the horizon, back down onto the dunes and just giving us this really nice, even very warm, very red light. Last morning here and another lovely sunrise on the dunes. Now we got up and shot the pre-dawn light, the blue arrow, which was really nice. It had lots of warm textures on the sand, although it wasn't quite as good as last night. But as soon as the sun's come up, it's a little bit harsh. There's a lot of strong shadows. It doesn't work quite as well. There's some abstract compositions amongst the dunes, but the best light was really before the sun came up. Now we did also do some astro work this morning. We got up at about half past five. The Milky Way was setting just over the ocean. So we set up some astro shots, but we'll be talking about astro photography in another video because we've done a few sessions during this trip. But for now, it's just good time to have breakfast, pack up the tents and then head back to Varvis Bay. The journey back to civilization across the dunes took a couple of hours. And while it was really hard to leave, it was just very good to get back to the hotel and have a proper shower. Now, before we left Varvis Bay, we still had time that afternoon to do a helicopter flight, which lasted about 90 minutes. We took the helicopter and just flew back down over the coast, over some of the parts that we'd driven down across Sandwich Harbor, where there's just millions of flamingos nesting. So the helicopter had no doors. We were flying about 700 meters to about a thousand meters, first over the dunes and then over the top of all these flamingos. And it was absolutely incredible just to be able to photograph out of the window, looking down on the flamingos and the pelicans and the dunes and just to try to create really abstract images from the views that we were getting from the helicopter. Now, shooting from a helicopter, you really need to have a very fast shutter speed to avoid any shake or any blur or something like that. So we're shooting at about one over 1,000 and to get that, had the aperture wide open because you really don't have to worry about depth of field. And I increased the ISO just a little bit just to make sure all the images were as sharp as they could be. Now, the flight lasted about 90 minutes, but it just flew by and it was just a really incredible experience to finish the time that we spent on the Skeleton Coast. Now, that's it for this video. I really hope it's been interesting, but I can't finish without saying thank you to Rogat and Jeandre, who have been my co-leaders on this workshop and who have done so much of the heavy lifting. It's been so much of the work that they've been putting in over years to put together the knowledge of the locations, to put together all of the stuff that we needed for things like this, for the camping, for getting into these places, for just being incredible co-leaders, incredible workshop hosts. And I'm gonna put a link to their work in the description below, so make sure you check out their stuff. They're both incredible photographers and filmmakers and I'm really looking forward to working with them again next year when we come back and in the years after that. So if you'd like to join us, there's full information on the workshops that we're gonna be doing on my website, so check that out. And also the other workshops that I'm gonna be doing, I'm gonna be in Greenland next year, Iceland, the Dolomites. So if there's anything that you're interested in, just drop me a line, let me know, and I'll get back to you. And as ever, thanks so much for watching. Good luck with all your photography and take care. See ya.