Learning to Photograph Wildlife in Namibia

So I'm here in Etosha, in the north of Namibia, and I'm attempting to shoot wildlife. It's really not easy. So I've been a landscape photographer for about 20 years now, and in the time that I've been doing landscape photography and traveling around and going to places to shoot landscapes, I've occasionally had the opportunity to also shoot wildlife. So when I've been here in Namibia previously to shoot dunes at Sossusvlei, I've had the chance to capture flamingos and oryx on the dunes. And when I was in Greenland last year to shoot the icebergs, we were really, really lucky to get the chance to shoot a polar bear also. And also when I've been in Iceland for landscapes, we've had the chance to capture Arctic foxes there. But all those trips have really been about landscapes and the wildlife has been kind of just an additional thing that we've just shot because we've had the opportunity. This is the first place where I've come specifically to shoot wildlife, to go on safari, to go on game drives, to try to find animals and to try to capture them. And because I've got trips coming up in the future, I'm gonna be in the Galapagos next month. I'm gonna be in Botswana next year and then back in here in Etosha in Namibia. Then it's kind of something that I really think that I should learn. And it's just, yeah, it's been here three days now and it's really hard. It's really, really hard. So where we are now is a place called Etosha. It's a national park in the north of Namibia and it's this huge flat clay pan. It's a long way out of the parts of Namibia that I'm used to visiting. We had to come up here by small plane and it's just a fascinating journey to fly over Namibia and to come into this part of the country that I really don't know at all. But a few weeks before I came up here, Namibia had some of the heaviest rainfall that it's had for at least a decade. So parts of the country that used to be desert and scrub and clay pan are now really, really green because all of this grass has grown up and all of this brush has grown up. Now, the effect that that has on wildlife is it does bring lots of wildlife here to graze on the grass and then that brings the predators who come after the grazers, after the herd animals. But it also means that there's lots of grass and brush here so it is much harder to see the animals because they can be incredibly well hidden if they're more than 10 meters from the road. Unless it's something really big like a rhinoceros or an elephant or a giraffe, then you're probably not gonna be able to see it. And they're incredibly dispersed over this really massive area of the national park. So seeing animals has been incredibly challenging, much more challenging than we thought it would be and much more challenging than it is normally in this part of the world from what I'm informed. And beyond that, Etosha has very strict rules about not going off-road in the vehicles. You have to stay on the specific trails. You can't get out of the vehicles at any time so you're not allowed to go with guys and track animals and follow them and try to find out where they are. Basically, you're limited to what you can see from the road. And when you can see so little from the road, it really is like the first thing is that it's just very, very hard to find the animals. And one of the other things that I found challenging is that wildlife photography is incredibly reactive. Basically, you see something and then you have to very quickly adapt to how to shoot it. As a landscape photographer, I'm used to being able to kind of plan out shots, plan out treks, walk up to a place, explore it, find the composition and then sit and wait for the light, wait for the conditions. And I really liked that process. I really liked that kind of slow meditative process. And wildlife photography is very different from that. You're kind of looking and looking and looking and waiting to see something and then you have to react really quickly. And it can be incredibly chaotic because the animal is constantly moving. So it's going behind bushes, walking behind things. So the composition is constantly changing. The focus is constantly changing or there's multiple animals in the shot. So you're trying to frame compositions in something that's constantly moving or trying to react to that. And so, yeah, what I found is that I'm trying to grab shots so quickly that a lot of the things that I really look for in compositions that are important to me in landscape photography, like checking the edges, I'm kind of forgetting about like the basics. I'll find that I'm cutting off the legs or cutting off the tops of horns of animals because I'm just seeing the animal and trying to grab a shot and frame it as quickly as possible. So creating, so it's not just seeing the animals and creating kind of dynamic, compelling compositions that work is incredibly hard. And then you've got the lighting conditions because the animals are moving to shadow, but you want to wait and turn around, but you want to get light on the face. And then I think the most important thing about any wildlife photography is that you want to have a connection with the animal. Just having a shot of the animal walking, it's not really that interesting. You want to have some interesting behavior or some connection with the animal. So the animal looking at you, looking at the lens, making eye contact. So there's a lot of finding the animal then waiting for it to do that and then hoping that when it does that, that it's going to get light on its face. It's not going to be in a shadow. It's not going to be behind a bush. So yeah, all of those things have been really, really challenging. Framing, composition, finding the animals are things that I really struggled with. And I don't really feel yet that I've captured any image that is just like a really compelling image. Something that I'm really proud of, something that I want to print and put up on the wall. So for example, on the first day that we're here, as soon as we left the lodge in this beautiful golden light, we saw this white rhino right next to the road. And just so excited to see it. My first reaction is, oh, I have to get a photograph of this. And I've got a very long lens on the camera. I'm using a 500 millimeter lens, which on APS-C, so in full frame terms, that's 750, so it's very tight. So I'm just really struggling, so busy trying to capture just any image of this rhino that I didn't really capture any decent image. I wasn't organized and calm enough in my head to just slow down and try to find a composition, work with the eyes and the horn and just really try to make an interesting portrait. So yeah, I kind of really feel that I missed that opportunity and then later on, we heard that there were lions at the water hole, so we drove over to the water hole. And again, trying to find a composition of these lions. As soon as we got there, they just slowly started walking away from us. So by the time I'd got everything kind of set up and I got my focus worked out, these lions are kind of walking away. And in images of animals walking away from you, really aren't compelling. And for sure, it's amazing for me to see this lion. But what I wanna do is create compelling images and images of animals walking away. Even if it's a lion, it doesn't really create a great image. And what I found is that animals walking away from you is pretty much the norm. It's something that happens a lot in wildlife photography. Now, in terms of the equipment, this has always been a bit of a learning experience for me as well. I use this 100-400 a lot in the past for landscapes. It's a really good lens for that. And I have used it sometimes here for some of the wildlife, but I've also been able to borrow this 500mm lens and 500mm on the APS-C Fuji that I use, that's 750mm in full frame equivalent. Now that gives you incredible reach. And in a place like Etosha, where the animals are often quite distant, it does allow you to pull the animals a lot closer. It gives you a lot of reach. But what I've also found is that when the animals are relatively close, it's really, really tight. So I've sometimes struggled to get the whole of the animal in the frame, and then you don't have time to change the lens. So if you, by the time you've changed the lens, then you've lost the shot. So I've been trying to make the composition work with whichever lens that I have on at the time. And if that happens to be the prime, then you're kind of very limited. You can't zoom in and out to reframe. You have to kind of stick with that fixed focal length. But what that lens does do for smaller animals, it really allows you to kind of fill the frame with them. And for more distant animals on the horizon, it allows you to pull them closer and still kind of get plenty of detail. But what I've been doing a lot of is just focusing on the face. And it is quite limiting. You're not getting as much of the animal in the environment. It's kind of forced me to do most of my shots as portraits, as portraits of just the head. So I don't know, I think maybe this afternoon, I'm going to, when we go on, I'm going to just try to use 100 to 400 and get some wider shots just to try to get a little bit more of the environment around the animals. And then of course, another challenge for me has been the autofocus. Now, when I shoot landscapes, I usually use manual focus. It's a very slow, very calm process. You can make sure you get the mountain nice and sharp or whatever subject it is that you're photographing. Here, focus is incredibly chaotic. It's very fast moving. You've got animals walking behind grass, animals crossing over in front of each other. So the autofocus can kind of jump around or not quite know what to grab. So a lot of that is just making sure that you get the settings right in camera. So what I've been using is subject tracking, which does a very good job of once you've got focus on the subject, it finds it in the frame and keeps focus on it. And then sometimes I've been using a specific focus point and getting that focus point as small as possible so I can drop it exactly on the animal. So the autofocus knows what it is that I'm looking for. Sometimes, even when you've got the subject tracking on as the animal walks behind grass, the autofocus can grab the grass instead. So you get nice sharp grass, but the animal behind is out of focus. If you've got that point focus, it allows you to kind of focus between the blades of grass. But when I've been photographing the birds, I've been using the zone focus because it's much easier to grab the bird as it's flying in the sky and track that across the frame. I think one of the biggest challenges for me has been the unpredictability and the lack of control that you have. And for sure in landscapes, the weather's unpredictable, although you have weather forecasts. So you kind of do always know a little bit about what you're gonna get. But here, you really have no idea. You don't have a lot of controls. So you're sitting in the back of the truck and you're looking for animals and it could be that you're gonna see a bird, it could be that you're gonna see something huge like a rhinoceros, or it could be one of the grazing animals like a zebra or a giraffe or a wildebeest, or it could be something like a leopard. And then what I found is that you can't help but have expectations. So I've seen so many incredible wildlife images in my time as a photographer. So you kind of come here and you really do want, you know, like a great elephant shot or a great shot of something like a leopard or a cheetah, these beautiful animals. But these sightings are incredibly rare. We've been here three and a half days now. We know that there are elephants here because we see their traces everywhere, but we've not seen an elephant yet. And then the predator animals, the things like the leopards or the cheetahs, they're very good at hiding. You know, that's what they do. So you're very, very fortunate to see them. And what you do see a lot of is things like the zebras and the wildebeest and the oryx, the springbok. And these are all lovely animals. And the first time you see them, that there's this incredible excitement and you're trying to get those shots. But then when you've seen so many of them, and it's the same with the birds, the birds are really pretty, but you see them so often that you kind of develop almost an immunity to them because you've got this fixation, like want to get the shot, want to get a shot of a leopard, I want to get a shot of a cheetah, which is a shame. I suspect most people who are not obsessed with photography can just enjoy a safari much more in a much more kind of measured way because they don't have this obsession with getting the shot that drives a lot of photographers. But unfortunately, it's very, very hard to escape from expectation. It's very hard to come to a place with zero expectations. But the flip side of that is that when you do start to get close to something, when you do get that chance of seeing something really special, then it gets incredibly exciting. The other night, the guide glimpsed a leopard and it was really, really close to the truck, just a few meters away, but completely hidden by the bush. And we spent about an hour slowly following it, slowly trying to guess where it was going to come out of the bush. And then when you do get a sighting of it, and you're following it, you're tracking it, and you just get that moment when the light's on its face and it looks back at you and you catch it with the frame, that for me makes the whole day worthwhile. Now, it's not by no means an amazing shot, but I think that's where the magic comes from. That's the thing that keeps pushing you. That's just the chance, the chance of getting something like that, of seeing something like that. And that, I suspect, is what's going to bring me back again and where the excitement's going to be coming next year when I come back to Botswana and come back to Namibia. So this is our last morning in Etosha and it's just finished in such an incredible way. The three days that we've been here have been incredibly challenging to find animals. We've been really struggling for sightings. And then last night, we had an incredible cheetah sighting in really good golden light. We were able to sit and observe the cheetah. It was kind of sleeping, waiting for night. And the guides that we have are incredibly well-trained, so they got out and they could walk us around to the animal. So we were in an area where the animal was aware of us and was looking at us, but wasn't feeling threatened. So we were able to get really low, get some really nice shots of it through the golden light. And it was just a really magical experience just seeing this cheetah move around, watching it. And then we went out at six o'clock this morning, drove around looking for animals, and we were lucky that there was a sighting of a lioness with two cubs. So we got to drive up and watch the lioness, watch the cubs feeding, just sit there and watch them playing. The cubs were really curious. They kind of walked up to our car at one point. And it was just really incredible. And with the cheetah last night, with the lions this morning, you get so excited that you kind of forget all of the rules of photography that you know. It's like trying to frame them, making sure that you're not cutting off the feet and that you're getting them in the center of frame. I didn't want to waste time changing lenses, so I was shooting them all with the 500mm, which is incredibly tight, which means I get really nice portraits, but I didn't get a lot of the environment that they're in. And yeah, just technical things, reminding myself to make sure that you're getting focused because it's very easy for the focus point to shift and then just grab a little bit of grass as they're moving from shadow into light, keeping an eye on the exposure, making sure you're not overexposing because they're playing and moving fast, making sure we have really fast shutter speeds of 1 over 2000, 1 over 2500. So yeah, trying to remember all the technical aspects of photography while still really taking the time to appreciate just how magical the morning was and how lucky we were to witness that. So that's it for Onguma. I'm going to be back here photographing wildlife again next year and just really excited now. I've just really enjoyed it so much, but now I'm going to go and have breakfast, have coffee, and then we head off to the airfield. So that's it for this video. I hope it's been interesting. If you've got any questions at all, just please drop them in the comments below and I'll get back to you. And yeah, thanks for watching. If you enjoy the channel, please like and subscribe. It really does help. And if you enjoy my photography and you'd like to join me on one of these workshops, we're coming back here next year to Namibia. We'll be in Botswana as well, photographing wildlife. And we've also got trips to places like the Azores, to Utah, to Alaska, to Madeira coming up, to Japan. You can find full information on all my trips on my website. So please check that out and drop me an email if you've got any questions. And as ever, thanks so much for watching and good luck with all your photography and I'll see you next time. Take care.