Workshops and Landscapes

A purple roller and a hoopoe.

They are such elegant and beautiful animals.

Practising new skills from the landscape workshop.

 Wednesday, May 10^th.

For only the second time this month we were allowed to get up after the sun, what a pleasure. Then when I went out I was greeted by a gorgeous sunny, warm morning, great way to start the day. We slept will the power was on and woke up to the power off. We had to wait to start our morning presentations until it came back on at 9:30. The first was presented by Tom from Liverpool, the new photography assistant for Paula. His was on social media and how to use it to follow and connect with professional photographers; to learn more about the profession and skills from website tutorials; and how to promote yourself and your photographs using Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and the like. He pointed out that the video format, he calls them reels, are overtaking still photography images on most platforms which is upsetting many professional photographers. The second was by Paula about how to take good landscape shots using a tripod and manual settings. There is a lot of excitement in camp today as one of the camera traps caught a pride of lions in the reserve we wanted to go to last night. Apparently, we just missed them because of the unruly elephants. Now they are wondering if the elephants were annoyed or alarmed by the presence of lions as opposed to us. We went for an afternoon drive to shoot landscape shots. We went up to the lookout where we had our first gin drive and used our tripods to take landscape shots of the river and the sunset. I used the manual setting an experimented with ISO, aperture and slow shutter speeds. It was easier to experiment in this situation than it is in a truck and you are afraid of missing an animal shot. I think that maybe this workshop should have been earlier in our month. But, interestingly Bruce, Koert and Matt don’t care for landscape shots. We stayed until the sunset and then went back to camp for the usual Wednesday night t-bone dinner. It rained during our dinner but although we were outside we were covered. It’s our last t-bone night  and people seemed to get caught up in the feeling of the end drawing near and the beer flowed liberally. We were escorted out of the bar by 9 and Bruce and I spent the next hour or two talking to Timo. He is a much more mature and nicer young man when all the young guys are gone. We finally turned in at 11.