62 TAKE YOUR PIC

Toast Coetzer gives feedback on reader photos. Send in yours and you could win a camera bag worth R520!

ELMAR VENTER

Canon EOS 1Dx

Canon 500 mm lens with a 1.4x converter

ELMAR WRITES: I took this photo of a juvenile bearded vulture at the Giant’s Castle vulture hide. I visited the hide for four consecutive days and hoped one of these raptors would come in for a landing.

On the last morning, everything fell into place. I like the symmetry of the bird’s posture.

TOAST SAYS: Four days in a row? That’s dedication! Sometimes you have no choice: You know exactly what kind of photograph you want, you’re in the right place, so you just have to be patient and wait.

The bearded vulture isn’t any old bird of prey – it’s our most endangered, rarest vulture. Some context: There were 285 tries scored during the 2019 Rugby World Cup, just a few less than the number of bearded vultures remaining in the wild. There are only 320 left in South Africa and Lesotho, where they occur high in the Drakensberg and the Maluti Mountains.

The spread of the vulture’s wings is perfect. It looks iconic,

DIRESSH PARBHOO

IG: @diressh_parbhoo Canon EOS 650D

Sigma 150 – 500 mm lens

DIRESSH WRITES: I took this photo in the Kruger, close to the Biyamiti weir in the south of the park. This male leopard was relaxing in a tree on a hot day, but came to attention when he saw some impala across the road. He quickly jumped down and I managed to capture him as he “ran” down the tree.

DIETER SCHWARZ

IG: @poolcleaner82 Nikon D850

Nikon 14 – 24 mm

DIETER WRITES: I took this picture outside Sutherland in the Karoo. I really wanted to try my hand at a star-trail photo, but first I needed to learn about the technical aspects before I could plan my composition. For the best results, you need a dark, cloudless night. On the night I chose, there was a three-hour gap between moonset and sunrise, which would be ideal.

Just outside Sutherland, on the road to the South African Astronomical Observatory, I had seen a farm building that I knew would make the perfect subject.

That night, I woke up at 2 am – but it was overcast! At 3.30 am I again stepped outside and this time it was clear. I jumped in the car with my gear and drove to the location. In the end, I took 150 shots on interval mode using a 30-second exposure each time, with the lens aperture set to f2.8. Post-shoot, I did a slight edit to all the shots in Adobe Lightroom, then I stacked them in Photoshop and lightened the layers to expose the star trails. The mission was a success! I hope you enjoy it.

TOAST SAYS: Lekker, Dieter, I’m enjoying it for sure! What a lovely pic. Thanks for providing the back story, which shows how much work goes into creating a shot like this. You did your homework from a technical point of view, but you also scoped out a great location with a very specific photo in mind. Landscape photography can be spur-of-the-moment – you drive somewhere and suddenly see the perfect composition, lit in golden afternoon light – but often you’ll find that the best photos are taken because a photographer has meticulously planned a shot for days, weeks or even months in advance.

The bottom of the frame is a bit tight – the building is very close to the edge – but besides that I can’t fault Dieter’s pic. Those magnificent arcs of stars… Amazing!

DEMI TOONTAS

Canon EOS 7D Mark II Canon 300 mm lens

TOAST SAYS: Demi took this photo in the Tuli Block, Botswana. I’m assuming the martial eagle is busy gathering sticks to build a nest… Demi caught the raptor in the act, making for an unusual photo of the eagle, which is more commonly photographed sitting stationary on a telephone pole, or soaring high above in the sky, becoming an eversmaller dot in your viewfinder as it rides a thermal.

A photo of an animal doing something is immediately more interesting. Think of a croc just parking off on a sandbank, motionless, versus a croc bursting from the water trying to catch an impala coming to drink. Worlds apart, right? But it doesn’t even have to be that dramatic. All you need is some typical behaviour showing the animal or bird going about its business (besides taking a nap or sitting dead still) even if it’s just a hadeda rootling for earthworms on your front lawn.

Demi’s eagle is lit perfectly, from above and from the front, which makes its piercing yellow eye glow like a diamond. I also like how the shape of the wings is almost mirrored by the shape of the branch, as if it’s flying with a stick-bird image of itself.

Great job!

NICK GREVILLE

Samsung A50

TOAST SAYS: Nick took this colourful landscape photo at Bergview Private Estate in the Central Drakensberg. Cellphone cameras are excellent for scenes with a mix of well-lit, sunny areas and darker, shaded areas. That’s because smartphones usually have built-in HDR (High Dynamic Range) software that automatically evens out the very bright and the very dark areas, resulting in a well-exposed photo.

I like the four layers of interest here, starting with the flowers and grass in the foreground. Next is the tar road (a person walking there, or a cyclist, would have added some extra spice), then the green, wooded valley that goes over into the sunlit upper slopes of the mountain before the fourth layer, the sky, closes out the top of the frame.

A peaceful, serene pic – look at it for 30 seconds and it will feel like you’ve been on holiday!

WHY? We publish a selection of reader pictures every month. Don’t be shy, haul out those shots you’ve been hoarding on your computer and send them to us! We like just about anything: wildlife, landscapes, portraits, holiday snaps or bugs in your garden. HOW? Send your best photos to

Don’t send files bigger than 4 MB – if we need a bigger version, we’ll ask for it. Give the name, surname, home town and contact number of the photographer. Also include info about where and how the shot was taken, and what equipment was used. If you manipulated your photo in any way, tell us what you did.

THE FINE PRINT We reserve the right to use your photos elsewhere in the magazine, on our digital platforms and marketing material.

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TAKE THE WINNING PHOTO

ome time back in early 2006, Toast Coetzer’s phone rang. On the line was Bun Booyens, the founding editor of Weg. ( The first issue of go! – the English sister title of Weg –would only be published later that year.)

“Toast, do you want to go to Mali?” Bun asked.

The Toyota Fortuner had just been launched in South Africa and an epic expedition had been dreamt up to promote it. The plan? Ship two Fortuners and two Land Cruisers to Dakar in Senegal, and drive them back to Cape Town. Toast joined the crew for the leg from Senegal to Mali.

“My time in Mali was magical,” he says. “It’s a dangerous place now and almost totally off-limits to visitors, so it was a real privilege to go there. Plus, I can forever say that I’ve been to Timbuktu!

“Most of the assignment was shot on film, but I also had a Nikon D70 with me – an entry-level D-SLR camera at the time.” The film photos accompanied Toast’s feature in go! #2 (August 2006). These are some of the digital shots, which Toast converted to black and white. “Monochrome puts a different spin on the images,” he says. “They seem tethered more to memory now, instead of a particular time and place.”

“It was one of the hottest days I’d ever experienced in my life – 54° C according to the vehicle gauge – and the Gandamia Mountains (above) were shrouded in dust, blown in from the nearby Sahara Desert.

“At a place called Douentza, we left the tar road and drove the final 200 km stretch to Timbuktu. But first, we got lost. This couple on a camel (right), pointed us in the right direction.”

HOW? Above: Nikon D70, Nikon 70 – 300 mm lens, shutter speed 1/500 second, aperture f11,

ISO 400.

Right: Nikon D70, Nikon

70 – 300 mm lens, shutter speed 1/2 000 second, aperture f7.1, ISO 400.