Enjoy Your Trip -- A Photographic Essay of Tanzania and Kenya
Final cut -- thought I'd share, have a great trip for those of you that have not yet experienced KT!
https://iluv2fly.smugmug.com/Tanzania-and-Kenya-2018/
https://iluv2fly.smugmug.com/Tanzania-and-Kenya-2018/
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Ah, I note that the K and T tour is now very different from when we took it about ten years ago! We have never seen chimps on any of our Africa tours. I see that the Sweetwater facility gets very mixed reviews on other websites, but is now on the tour. I feel from what I read that our experiences on K and T were so different when we took it and it was at least a day longer.
I am hoping Tauck will consider tours to Rwanda to see Gorillas in the near future because I would prefer not to use another company. Our recent tour to Namibia, the camps were fine but everything else was very inferior to Tauck plus being told your belongings may not be safe if you leave them on the bus from the driver that the company uses, that is shocking and the cancellation policy dreadful compared to Tauck—- we have never had to cancel a trip but it’s good to know Taick does the right thing.
Wow! Absolutely amazing photos. We are going in August. My husband has read your other post on camera lenses and he is busy shopping now
Anyway, I got back into photography because I retired, started traveling more with my wife, but was bored with museums and churches. I'm not very cultured
So, now, I'm enthused with a Nat Geo, Pulitizer-Prize winning photographer named Jay Dickman -- you can Google him. And I like that style -- story-telling with photos -- and I like his equipment -- he's rep for Olympus. So I carry two Olympus OMD-EM1 Mark IIs with a Black Rapid Dual shoulder harness (absolutely boring for non-photographers). For KT, I swung a 40-150mm (80-300 DSLR equivalent) on my right side and a 300mm M.Zuiko Pro lens on my left side. The latter had the Olympus tele-converter, so that lens was an 840mm equivalent. It pulled in the leopard in the tree -- and no one else in our group, I don't think, had that kind of magnifying power. Actually, I used the latter 80% of the time.
I take almost all my shots on Manual, so I can get the exposure and shutter speed the way I would like -- good color saturation, motion blur, bokeh. But I learned a lot in Africa, and am steadily improving in my photography. We went to Australia/New Zealand last year with Tauck, and the photos were decided a level poorer. So I'm overjoyed that one can improve as a photo enthusiast.
British: Sweetwaters WAS a disappointment. The chimps were behind hugely tall fencing. The two pictures of Po-Po, of the PTSD fellow, was shot through the fence, and in one of them, I had to erase the lines of the fence on his face, using a program called Adobe Light Room. On the other hand, seeing him almost brought me to tears -- he really looked apathetic, depressed, and bummed out. So, seeing the chimps, even though at a distance, was worth it.
I don't know if you visited a Masai school when you went ten years ago. That, too, was intensely moving. The kids were just soo lovable. The weirdest thing, we later found out (because my wife was a teacher and is rounding up her teacher friends to make a contribution to the school), is our TD has a connection to this particular school. The school is named after his MOTHER, I guess because she did something wonderful to help these kids. We're in the process of Googling to find out more. Masai kids and abused Masai women FLOCKED to our TD to hug him.
We were also moved by the Nanyuki Spinners Organization. Many of those women look like they suffered hardships and are still sponsored, I believe, by a Presbyterian church.
Africa changes you, doesn't it?
Put an Africa tour on your bucket list!
If it helps, here's what I do. I delete during the roller coaster ride, then back at the hotel. Oftentimes, 90-95% are gone by the end of the day. Mirrorless cameras can now take up to 64 pictures a second. I never use that setting -- it would be overwhelming. I've met folks on these trips that just can't let go of their images. Somehow, after they pressed the shutter, it seems, the image becomes sort of sacred. But they develop huge image libraries that they then can't face.
But that was what Light Room was developed for -- you go through your images, mark them by the star system, 0-5, (or by colors, or by the X key), use the filter and batch delete the losers. I find myself getting more critical (in a good sense) too, saying to myself that I'll never have use for an image like that -- or that I have 3 of those elephants in the same pose -- lose two. The problem is not storage space, even with RAW files. The problem is you'll never find the winners in a mountains of losers.
At the risk of offending folks with medical knowledge, I'd like to relate my personal experience with the "African Massage" -- the roller-coaster. I remarked to one of our guide-drivers that he was going 55 mph over a dirt rutted road. He said that (pro drivers do it that way) it makes for a smoother ride -- I guess you're in the air half the time.
Anyway, I have relatively minor back problems -- usually relieved by such remedies as swimming. But the KT trip did make me anxious, and back problems did recur -- I used Tylenol, tried to relax at the hotels, tried to get rest, tried sitting on something cushioning, etc. It is a rough -- sometimes many hours long, even punishing ride and it would seem prudent to evaluate that in terms of your wife's vulnerabilities.
Most folks don't seem to be bothered by the ride though, but some of us are vulnerable.
Doug
https://iluv2fly.smugmug.com/Tanzania-and-Kenya-2018/
I don't know if it would be too forward of me, but I'd like to share with you the advice one of my instructors gave me in critiquing my images, so that, if you wish, you might improve your own learning curve in taking pictures.
1. Look at others' images, pros, non-pros, magazines whatever, and ask "What makes this image work? What gives it interest, energy, what makes the viewer stop and look at it more than a half second?"
2. Critique (go back and critique my photos) and others' photos -- not criticize them, but critique the images. Ask questions like:
a. Hmm, looks like too much sky, too much dead space, boring. Or too much ground. Does nothing for the image. He needs to move in closer or crop it.
b. Cheez! He cut off an arm at a strange place. It would look better if he cut off an arm (head, foot) over here.
c. The image has too many distractions, too many elements. My eye is wandering all over the place. I want my eye led straight to the thing of interest (using roads, railroad tracks, S curves, etc.).
d. The colors are complementary or non complementary -- I love the browns with the reds, etc.
e. The shadows are too dark -- I can't see the detail. Or, I like the shadows, they hide the detail and lead my eye to the object of interest.
f. He didn't use the Rule of Thirds -- center the subject at one of the cross points of a tic tac toe diagram. Is it effective where he put the subject?
g. I like the lighting, the way the shadows fall, I like the Golden Light of evening, or I don't like the lighting -- it's too harsh, etc.
h. Gee I don't like the angle he took the picture from. It's a child! He should have got on his knees or belly to take the shot.
So think up your own questions to ask yourself.
Anyway, my view is that we should help each other rather than view it as a competition -- it's a hobby.
Doug
I used to be more into photography in the late film/early digital era. I even took a Photoshop course and I was the only non-graphic designer in the class (the last two letters of my handle IDs my profession). Over the last 10 years or so, I lost interest and probably forgot everything I knew about Photoshop, also to the point where I've only used a cell phone camera to take pics on my last few trips (blasphemy, I know!) But these were cultural trips and not wildlife/landscape trips.
I sold my Nikon (film) body and lenses a number of years ago. Only camera I currently own is a ~10 year old Nikon Coolpix.
One question for you - for the pics you posted, have they been Photoshopped beyond simple cropping, such as adjusting levels, curves, brightness/contrast, etc?
Not too sure about the history, but Adobe built a companion to Photoshop, called Lightroom. I think it sort of started out as a digital companion to Photoshop. With Light Room -- you download your digital images into it, and it gives a large center screen that is like looking at slides on a slide viewer. Then there are many ways to grade, mark, sort your digital images, as mentioned above to Sandman, and then quickly batch delete them, form groups or Collections, etc.
But Lightroom has become much more powerful than that sorter -- you can switch from the slide viewer sorting mode to a Developing and later Printing mode. In the Developing mode there are many different modules so you can apply all kinds of changes to the entire or parts of the image. I, for example, masked off, quickly, the lioness's eyes, and brightened them so she'd look glaringly fierce, LOL.
At any rate, I think what has happened is that a lot of us use Light Room as our primary app -- sort of like doing minor to not so minor surgery, but can switch, with a press of a key, into Photoshop to do major surgery -- like removing an object, person, etc. from the image and substituting something else. Lightroom is, compared to Photoshop, very easy to use, once you get introduced to it, so I think that is why it predominates, especially if you're not a graphic design person, etc. An especially great feature about LR is that it does not change or harm your original image. It makes changes to the image, as you see it, but only saves the INSTRUCTIONS to changing the image -- its non-destructive to your digital negative.
So the short answer is that I do a lot of post-image processing in LR, but it usually only takes me a few minutes. For example, I changed most of the skies in the Africa images, because it was usually a bland gray. Contrary to the days of film, post-image processing is not only seen as legitimate, but as necessary. If you aren't a documentary photographer or newsman, you'll probably go for the most artistic image you are capable of, so I think most folks that get involved in amateur photography nowadays soon find themselves doing a lot of post-processing. In short, it's no longer cheating, it's part of the job.
I hope you will think about re-involving yourself in the hobby, particularly if you're doing a significant amount of travel. I find it adds to the experience of travel and experiencing new locations and cultures, and that you actually begin to perceive, visually, in a different, rather astonishing way. It's sort of like meditation (I used to teach meditation and hypnosis to other clinical Ph.Ds., as a clinical psychologist), you begin to see colors, forms, compositions in a way without your usual everyday blinders. The world begins to open up in new ways.
Doug
https://iluv2fly.smugmug.com/Tanzania-and-Kenya-2018/n-zX344G/