Happy first day of Spring! My goodness I am certainly happy to say that, and also very happy that it is finally starting to feel like winter has loosened its grip around here. I’m at the point now where only 50% of my lawn is still cover in snow!
For today, I thought I would share a mixed bag of photos from my trip to East Africa.
Happy Monday all, and have a wonderful week!
A juvenile gorilla with a tasty branch.A young lion amongst the acacia.A spooky tree that I think would be amazing to shoot with the stars in the background. Fingers crossed I find some more spooky trees on my next trip.A pair of hyena pups wrestle outside of the den site near the Amboseli airstrip.A giraffe in a fever tree forest in Ol Kinyei Conservancy in Kenya.
The prompt for the week is to show a wish, and mine is simple, but it seems at the moment, not easy at all. I wish for all these beautiful, wild creatures to be safe, and have the opportunity to live long, natural lives without knowing the horror of poaching or human / wildlife conflict.
A tender moment between mama and baby. Truly a magical thing to witness. Uganda, September 2016.A bachelor group of elephants in Queen Elizabeth Park. September, 2016.A pair of lion cubs playing in the Masai Mara. September, 2016.
Again this week I am replacing my “What I’ve seen this week” post with some photos from my time in Uganda. Basically, because all I have seen recently is snow… and not the nice to photograph, snow glistening from sunlit trees… the regular, driveway and road clogging, get out the snow blower and get on with the day kind of snow. Perhaps my desire for winter to end is a bit apparent!!! But anyways, on with today’s post.
During my time in Uganda, I took an afternoon boat trip along the Kazinga channel, where I saw more kingfishers in under 3 hours than I had seen in all my life before, combined. I’m not exaggerating to say there were hundreds of individuals there. There are nesting colonies along the river banks with dozens of birds at each site, and it just kept going and going.
Note, I meant to post this much earlier in the day, but I have been having nothing but issues with the WordPress “http error” when trying to upload images. My workaround was loading them to Google Drive, downloading to my mobile phone and uploading to media that way, but it certainly isn’t an efficient work around. Hopefully the “Happiness Engineers” will have some info as to how to resolve this issue.
Now, onto the pictures.
It was easy enough to get a photo of a pair of kingfishers as we cruised along, but the tree had probably 20+ birds in it.
Get off my branch!A malachite kingfisher spotted in the reed beds.A happy couple perched on an acacia tree.My first sighting of a woodland kingfisher – what a beauty!Another view of the malachite in the reeds. I spotted two of these while on the cruise, but only managed decent-ish photos of one.It was very loud from all the calling and chattering by the pied kingfishers.The pied kingfishers nest in the steep banks of the channel.Soaked after a dip.On the lookout.
After a few posts dedicated to my time with the gorillas, I thought I’d better get back to a bit of variety. I hope you enjoy my choices for Monochrome Monday.
Have a great week everyone!
A group of wildebeest crossing the Mara River.Lions enjoying a small patch of shade in the late morning.A white fronted bee-eater.A wildebeest looks towards a group of lions, seen near the Amboseli airstrip.Napping elephants in Amboseli National Park.
This is my final instalment in a 3 part blog series on Gorilla Trekking in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. If you missed previous posts, you can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.
Showering love on the baby. What a beautiful thing to witness.
As I said in my earlier post, I had a GoPro on a headmount for the trek and my regular camera. I am definitely not a videographer, and looking back, I think having the GoPro on time-lapse mode may have been a better option than video during the trekking portion, as the video is very jerky from all the motion. I was, however, able to capture the silverback Makara on a mock charge when we arrived at the gorilla family on my first trek, and having that captured alone makes all the other crappy video worthwhile.
There is a good possibility that you will be photographing the gorillas through fairly thick vegetation at some point during your time with the family. Daylight is often very filtered, with combinations of heavy shade and some very bright spots of sunlight (if you get a nice day like I did). All of this combined can make shooting pretty tricky. I kept my camera on auto ISO and manually controlled the aperture and shutter speed. I believe I had my camera on spot metering, but I think matrix would have been a better option. On day one especially, with the juveniles so active, I kept my shutter speed fairly high and as such had a high ISO, usually 3200 or 6400 for most images. I also kept my camera on auto white balance, and it did a fairly good job of capturing colours that feel accurate while I am doing my post processing. In the group I was travelling with, only myself and one other person had SLR cameras, the balance were using either point and shoots or their phones. At some points I must admit I was a bit jealous with how lightweight their cameras were!
Whatever it is, the baby is amused 🙂Gorillas have amazing hands and feet. Just look at the big toe!
I mentioned before that I used a harness to help keep my camera from bouncing while trekking, and another consideration would be some plastic bags or dedicated rain cover for your camera in case the weather turns. Also, make sure you have a fairly large capacity memory card as you won’t want to be changing them while at your sighting, and make sure to start your trek with fully charged batteries. If you have a camera that is a battery hog, you might want to consider keep a spare battery in your pocket, as your backpack will be with the porters and trackers during your sighting.
The whole family together, day two of trekking.Makara with a few of the juvenile gorillas.Apparently napping on a friend is more comfortable than the forest floor.
Gorilla trekking was an amazing experience, and one that I would certainly consider doing again some day. While it may seem silly to some that I spent such a long time getting ready for the trip, I wanted to be prepared and make sure that I wasn’t wasting my time and money by showing up for an experience that I wasn’t fit enough to do. While I was lucky to have two fairly short treks, one group on the first day I was in Bwindi didn’t return to park headquarters until around 6 in the evening, and apparently had a very strenuous and steep climb to see their gorilla group. You never quite know what is going to happen when you are out in the bush, so best to be a prepared as possible.
If you have any questions or want some additional information, please feel free to leave a comment, or get in touch via the contact form on my About Me page and I will do my best to answer.
While driving through Ishasha, we came across these rainbows just peeking through the storm clouds.This giraffe was not too impressed with our choice of road taken!A quick sunrise snap with my GoPro while driving through Amboseli.
Hanging out with the buffalo is definitely a good match for the egret, but I am not so sure it is a two-way street. The buffalo’s movement and grazing causes insects to scatter, becoming easy prey for the egrets that walk alongside the herd of buffalo. Here the buffalo was wading in shallow water at the edge of the river, and the egret is just catching a ride.
