Capture the creatures around your camp

Forget about lions and elephants for a day and take photographs around your rest camp. You’ll be amazed at the great variety of creatures that call it home.

Ioften feel very restricted when driving around the Kruger National Park in my little blue Daihatsu Terios. I can’t get as close to the animals as I’d like to when taking photographs, or move around them to change the way they are lit by the sun. So on some mornings, instead of heading out on a game drive, I stay in camp where I have much more photographic freedom. Here’s how I take nature photographs in and around my bush home.

1 GET CLOSE

Rest camp and lodge gardens are excellent places to photograph wildlife. If you spot a cheeky vervet monkey here you can stroll closer to take its picture without it dashing away. Monkeys around camp are much more used to humans walking up to them. It’s also the one place where you can get nice and close to wild birds. With enough patience even those with 300 mm lenses can fill their frames with relaxed bulbuls, hornbills and go-away-birds. The trick is to find the right spots for a stakeout, like fruit-bearing trees, feeding stations or nesting sites (as long as you always keep a respectful distance). I often make myself comfortable near a bird bath or even next to a swimming pool. Provided it’s hot enough and there isn’t too much natural water in the veld, there should be a steady stream of thirsty starlings, waxbills and babblers coming down to drink and bath.

2 CHANGE THE ANGLE

Getting closer to your subject is great, but an even bigger advantage of having the freedom to walk instead of drive is being able to move around your subject. In doing so, you change the angle with which the sun lights them up. Instead of photographing this golden orb web spider in front light, which many people do instinctively, I composed it with the sun hitting it from behind, creating a thin rim of light all around its body and lovely dashes of light all over its delicate web. And by using a shallow depth of field (f/2.8 in this case), I was able to blur most of the web, drawing attention to the long-legged spider.

3 BEND YOUR KNEES

Another advantage of photographing in camps is the opportunity to move up or down. In a car you are always stuck at that one frustrating elephant-armpit-level, but in a place like Nossob you can squish your elbows in the sand and photograph the campsite’s ground squirrels at eye-level. And at Ntshondwe in Ithala you can climb the hillside to get a bird’s-eye-view of the surrounding valleys. I love photographing trees and other plants from the base of their trunks and stems upwards, creating striking photographs with a shallow depth of field that accentuates the texture of their bark or thorns.