The Silver Adventurer

Like most travel and adventure photographers, I’ve gone around many times on the question of camera support.  It’s a special problem with wildlife, and most of all, with birds.  Critters of any sort never seem to understand how difficult it can be to quickly get them in the field of view, focus, and either take a picture or start a video.  Once you get things started, they continue to torture you with movement, and through all of this you have to worry about keeping them in view and avoiding shake.

Tripods are almost impossible to use effectively in vehicles, which is how wildlife photography tends to be done (for safety reasons, and because you often happen on sightings while in transit).  If the subject is far enough away, though, and if it’s safe to get out of the vehicle and set up a tripod, there’s no question it offers the best possible camera support.  Where it won’t work, we have a number of options that present both plusses and minuses.

Many wildlife photographers will use the beanbag approach.  A beanbag is pretty much what the name suggests, a cloth or plastic container that’s filled with something that can be shaped to the contour of what it’s sitting on to keep it in place.  The camera is then placed with the lens or the tripod collar base on the beanbag for support.  It’s steady once set up, and because there’s no tight connection between beanbag and camera, you can usually pan to follow motion.

Beanbags have their issues, though.  First, it’s often difficult to find something you can rest it securely on.  Most won’t conform to something very narrow or highly irregular in shape, and if the only available seat is soft itself, the setup won’t be stable.  You often find yourself scrunching down in the seat to try to get the right angle, and you’ll have to move a lot of your body to pan, which means you have a good chance of running into something that stops your motion, like another person or a camera bag.

Another popular option is the monopod, which is a lot like a single tripod leg (expanding and all) with a mount on top.  A monopod won’t support a camera free-standing, but it will keep even a large camera reasonably steady for either photos or videos.  It attaches to the camera/lens like a tripod, so there’s not usually a lot of fitting issues.

The plus of monopods is that you can adjust the legs so that they rest on a seat, on the floor of a vehicle, on an ice chest, or whatever else is handy.  You can then get the camera to eye level without laying down.  Monopods also pan easily, and they’ll allow at least some up and down camera rotation to get shots of things that aren’t at eye level.  They’re typically light, and you’ll want to get the lightest option that will hold your camera, because sometimes you may have to pick the camera, lens, and monopod up and hold it like a camera to get into position quickly or aim at a target that’s fairly high.

The biggest minus of monopods is that if you forget they’re monopods and let go, camera, lens, and everything else falls.  Obviously, that’s a major disaster.  Monopods often have a small wrist strap to protect from this, but it makes it harder to switch cameras if you use it.  The second-most-cited problem is that it’s important to pay attention to whether you’re tilting the camera side to side because you’re not holding the monopod level.  If your camera has a level indicator, use it with a monopod.

Option three is the clamp.  A clamp lets you attach a gadget to a pipe or limb, usually not more than about two inches in diameter, and then attach the camera.  It will hold things as steady as whatever you’re clamping to permits (branches can bend!), and if you can attach it to a vehicle (the bar separating seats on a safari vehicle, the window using supplied spacers, or any other similar surface), it can offer stable support, almost like a tripod.

The problem is that once you’ve clamped onto something, you’ll have limited range of motion with respect to subject position.  If you clamp to something other than a horizontal surface, panning may hit the thing you’re clamped to.  The camera may also make it difficult to attach and detach the clamp, making a quick move difficult.  If you don’t clamp securely, you can also drop the whole rig, or have it turn around on the object you’re clamping and bump hard into something.

The last of my options, which is my current (and, of course, provisional) choice, is the flexible-leg short tripod popularized by the GorillaPod.  There are a series of these gadgets ranging from something that can hold a phone to something that will hold about 11 pounds of camera and lens.  The biggest one is about 15 inches tall, with three legs that look like robotic appendages, made up of a series of plastic-and-metal balls that let you twist each leg around something, creating (if you’re careful) a tight fit.  The plastic parts are non-slip, so on most surfaces they’ll hold in place.

Obviously, something 15 inches high won’t serve as a traditional tripod, but that’s where the winding-legs thing comes in.  Unless you’re in a desert (and even then, sometimes) there will be trees around you can wind something around.  There’s always your vehicle, too, and in case neither is available, you can bend the legs into a “buffalo horn” configuration with the last leg facing back, then hold the camera up in front by the horns, with the leg into your shoulder, and you have a pretty stable brace.

I tried one of the small GorillaPods in Africa in 2019, and it sort-of-worked for the smaller of the camera/lens combinations, the one I was using for video.  The “sort-of” qualifier is necessary because it was too light to hold even that really well, and it was totally incapable of holding the D500 with the 50-500 lens.  Still, it offered enough support to indicate a larger one could be the answer, so on my 2021 trip I’m going to be using the big model, with a custom ball head.  I’ll report on how that works after the trip!

On our October trip to Africa this year, we added a very new AndBeyond lodge, Tengile River Lodge.  The property is located in the Sabi Sands private reserve area west of Kruger National Park in South Africa, one of our favorite destinations.  It’s really a second lodge on AndBeyond’s Kirkmans Kamp property, and it has “transit rights” (meaning guest safaris can use) parts or all of a number of major nearby properties.  In all, it gives Tengile a very large area to drive in searching for wild animals.

The lodge is made up of nine individual villas, each of which has a private plunge pool and a large roofed but open veranda deck, overlooking the Sand River.  All of the rooms are very senior and handicapped-friendly, having only one level, and they’ll run you to and from your room in golf carts.  Each room has a separate living, bed, and bath area.  There’s a large and very well-stocked bar in the living area, and all the areas are heated/air-conditioned as conditions demand.  It’s surely the nicest accommodations we’ve had in Africa, and the rooms (even the ones closer to the main area) are quiet.

Meals are served in the common area or in an outdoor boma, and the food is excellent.  Breakfast is served family style from a tray, with orders of hot food taken at the table.  Lunch was sometimes done the same way, and sometimes ordered from a menu.  Dinner was either a menu or boma meal.  Drinks, except some very premium stuff, is included.

The Sand, at least this October, is largely what the name suggests—sand.  There’s still a bit of water flowing and so it attracts animals, which you can see from your room.  Birds and monkeys live in the trees around the room, and there was a young female leopard named after the lodge because she came and rested in the foundation of Room 5 (which happened to be our room!) during construction.  This leopard actually walked right through camp while we were watching her, and Daryl Dell, our ranger, had to radio in to get the guests and staff safely indoors.

Speaking of leopards, Sabi overall is great for them, and Tengile was no exception.  In a seven-day stay, we saw 13 different leopards, doing everything from mating to eating on kills.  Leopards are the hardest of all the “big five” (lion, leopard, Cape buffalo, rhino, and elephant) to see, so if you want to see the big five, Tengile is a great spot.  We saw them once this trip on a single game drive, in fact.  There’s also wild dog in the area at least occasionally, and we were lucky to see them, and to watch an encounter with a pack of hyena over a kill (https://youtu.be/hP1YUOJaW-w).

Tengile isn’t cheap; it’s the most expensive AndBeyond facility we’ve stayed at, in fact, but the accommodations and the game drives are phenomenal.  It’s also the best facility we’ve visited in accommodating people with mobility issues.  They’re served by a nearby airstrip so it’s easy to get in and out from Johannesburg, where most international flights will connect.  This, to me, is a must-see place

Back in September 2018 I did a blog on phone photography, and concluded that while you could get good pictures with a phone, it wasn’t a DSLR.  My wife decided to try to use her phone for video, and I recently got a new phone, so I want to talk now about phones and video, and why what you don’t know will hurt you.

Most of my photography, and my wife’s videography, focuses on travel and wildlife.  Many people don’t like having to see the world through a viewfinder or on a screen, and so what can be nice about a phone as a video camera is that you can mount it (with an adapter)  on a monopod, hold it steady, start shooting, and watch the critter, glancing back to be sure you’re stable and in-frame.  But wildlife is often reluctant to approach to just the right distance and stay posing for you, which means that it may be too far away and may be moving erratically.  Good DSLRs have zoom lenses and image stabilization, but how about phones?

You can almost always find out if a phone has image stabilization; it’s usually noted in the specifications and often in reviews.  Don’t sell this feature short, particularly if you’re shooting in a travel setting.  A good optical stabilization system will make video look a lot better, enough to make the difference between good footage and something that requires a bunch of post-processing stabilizing.  I’ll get to more on that below.

Let’s start with zoom.  As far as I know, nobody yet has a phone that will do optical zooming.  Thus, you’re limited to what’s called “digital zoom”.  Most good modern smartphones will shoot HD video at 30 and even 60 frames per second.  Everyone who’s used a smartphone camera app knows that you can zoom in and out, and with some as much as 8:1.  A phone camera is roughly equivalent to a 25mm lens on a full-frame DSLR, so an 8:1 zoom would give you 25-200, which sure sounds good, especially considering how much a full-frame DSLR with that range would cost and weigh.  Is it realistic?

Not often, it turns out.  One thing I was surprised to find was that reviews of how well a phone camera works in zoom mode are almost impossible to find.  An HD frame is about 2 megapixels, and a phone camera is about 12, which means you have six times the megapixel area to work with.  The frame is 1920 pixels across, and that means you could stack 4 HD images on a CCD.  Intuitively, that would mean you might be able to zoom to 4x without losing HD resolution.  But it doesn’t work like that.  When you zoom with most phone cameras in video mode, you are taking an HD frame and cropping it, meaning you are blowing up a piece of the image with fewer than 2 megapixels to fill that HD frame.  Any zoom at all will lose resolution.

We’ve found in practical use that a decent phone camera and a decent app will shoot video without zoom at a quality level that’s almost indistinguishable from what a DSLR will shoot.  Zoom in 2:1 and you can see a clear deterioration of sharpness.  At 4:1 you are blurry, and at 8:1 it’s junk.

This can be only the start of the bad news, too.  Remember the stabilization issue?  Well, images tend to get shakier as you zoom more, because a small camera movement is magnified.  You can do stabilization in post-processing with many video packages, but it can cause some significant problems.

When you stabilize an image in a video editor, what you are essentially doing is finding a “crop box” that centers on what you’re trying to get a smooth video of, like a leopard.  The box will be 16:9 in size ratio, like an HD video, but its size will be based on just how jiggly the leopard’s position is.  If the leopard is fairly steady, moving only about 20% of the frame dimensions or less, the crop box can be only a little smaller than the real frame.  The software will shift that little box to stay centered on the leopard, and blow up its contents to 1920×1080, the HD frame.  If the box is almost that size because not much motion was experienced, the degradation (which is in effect digital zoom) won’t be too bad.  A lot of motion, and it will be very bad.  If the leopard goes out of frame, you obviously have to cut the clip at that point.

Since both stabilizing and digital zoom degrade image quality, shooting video on a phone with no optical stabilization is likely to kill quality if you zoom, period.  This is why many phone videography tips start by saying “Don’t zoom!”

I have two digital cameras, one (Nikon D500 with a 50-500 Sigma zoom, which is 75-750mm in 35mm terms) for wildlife overall and one (Nikon D750, full-frame, with a 24-105mm Sigma) for wide-angle and most video.  Thus, when I needed a new phone, I wasn’t particularly worried about the camera.  I wanted a Google Fi phone, and the new Pixel 3a looked good, so I got it.  At one point, while getting all the apps installed, I tried the video camera app we use (Cinema FV-5) on the Pixel.  To my amazement, the zoom quality was much better.  The stabilization helped, but even without it, the image seemed much clearer even at full zoom.  With Google’s own with-the-Pixel camera app, it was better still; usable at about 6:1 zoom, where on both my old phone and my wife’s current Moto G6, even 2:1 was problematic.  In a flash, my new phone became my wife’s travel video camera!

Well, maybe.  The Moto G6 takes a micro-SD card, so we could fill it with storage for video.  The Pixel had, after my apps and other stuff, about 30G available to store video, which turns out to be about three and a half hours’ worth using the standard H.264 codec.  Fortunately, Google supports the more compressed H.265 on the Pixel 3a, which should give me about 25% more space, but that’s still maybe 4.5 hours.  That’s far less than she’d need for a trip, so we need some way of getting video off the phone to store and make room for more.

Google Photo will back up an unlimited amount of video at “high quality”, but you’d need about 200G to store a potentially active trip’s worth, which means buying it.  You could also expect the upload of 30G to the cloud to take some time, and you’d have to do it back in camp where you had WiFi.  If WiFi happened to be down and the phone’s full, that’s it for wifely video, which is not a good option.  A better option would be to dump to a card using the charging port on the phone…if possible.

If you look up how to use the charging port (USB-C on the Pixel 3a) as a USB port to attach an SD-adapter, you find that it works if you have an “On-the-Go” (OTG) cable…perhaps.  You can buy what are advertised as OTG cables, but they’re really just a cable with a USB-C connector for the phone and a female adapter to plug in a card reader.  No special cable is needed, and you get that adapter with the Pixel.  But even with it, there’s still an issue.  Android doesn’t support the exFAT or NTFS file systems used for bigger SDXC cards.  I tried to use some apps that claim to make these file systems work on Android, but they didn’t work for me.

What does work is a nice SD reader with a USB-C connector.  I got this one from Amazon, and it worked right out of the box with the Pixel 3a, both writing to a card (to unload videos) and reading from a card (to move files to the phone).  I suspect most good card readers will work as well, but with an important qualifier—the same old file system issue.  You need to use a file system Android will read, and if the card is bigger than 32G, the standard system won’t work.

What does work is to get some partitioning software that will reformat the SD card to FAT32, which Android does recognize.  You can find free and paid products online.  I got AOMEI Partition Assistant and did the reformatting, after which the cards will read/write on the Pixel and of course on my Windows 10 system too.  That means I can dump video to one of many 64G SD cards I have, and restore them at home.

Whether this is practical as well as possible depends on the time it takes.  If you had to dump the phone during an African game drive, any delay over perhaps 20 minutes could result in missing something.  The time it would take depends on the speed of the cards, the speed of the phone writing to them, the USB interfaces involved, and of course, the amount of data.  I estimate that the Pixel would hold about 3.5 hours of video in 30GB of free space.  How long would it take to dump it all to a card?  I couldn’t find any reliable data on this, so a test is necessary.  To set one up for yourself, get any large file or directory (a gig of data is nice) and load it onto a card on a PC, then transfer it to the Download folder of the phone.  Then, on a clean card, time the transfer back to the PC.  Multiply that time by the number of gigs (30 in my case) that you want to transfer in video form, and you have a good estimate of the time it will take.  Don’t use a whole bunch of little files; try to have the gig test file made up of a realistic number of files.  I took an old set of videos as my baseline to make it as realistic as possible; 13 video clips made up the required gigabyte.

Transferring 1.1G card-to-phone took 1min2sec.  The same transfer back to a 200x or faster card took 36 seconds.  On a Class 10 card it took 1min41seconds.  Based on that, let’s do the calcs.  Thirty gig is 27.3 times my test size, so a 36 second transfer for 1.1 gig would mean about 16.3 minutes.  The slower card would take 1.68 minutes for 1.1G, which is 45 minutes for 30G.  Either is OK if you’re going to use down time to dump phone to card, which means they’re suitable as a means of backing up videography on a phone without an expansion card.

The point of all of this is that if you want to use a phone with a good card reader, and you want decent-speed cards.  I tried two different fast cards, and once you get to 200x (30 MB/s) there doesn’t seem to be an improvement in write speed in my setup.  You can test your own, but don’t waste your money until you’re sure it will make a difference.

In the field, the key is to check the storage usage on the phone at least as you get close to filling it up, or after heavy use.  My plan is to dump the phone to a card at lunchtime unless we do an all-day drive.  If you think you might have to dump while traveling, be sure your phone is charged.  I carry a big battery pack to charge from if I expect to use the phone (or my wife does!) a lot for video when we’re in the field.  DO NOT run out of battery while dumping!

A final word of advice.  If you decide to use the H.265 compression to save space, be sure that your video editor will work with it.  I’m using Davinci Resolve 16, which does support it (I tested my phone video on Resolve and it was fine).  Several other video packages I tested didn’t support it at all, or if they did, they might not edit it properly.  Run a test video on your phone, dump to a card, try it on your computer, and make sure it edits, before you commit to field use!

After many happy visits, we’re dropping Kenya from our Africa itinerary.  I’ve sung the praises of the Mara and the crossing, Amboseli and the Ol Donyo lodge, and we have many fond memories of Kenya overall, but we’ve been confronting some issues from the first, and it’s time to move on.  I want to outline our thinking here for the benefit of other senior travelers.

Our first point is that it’s difficult under the best circumstances to do an Africa trip that involves multiple countries.  The way that safari camps work is that you typically try to arrive mid-day and catch the afternoon safari, then leave after the morning safari on your day of departure.  When you’re changing countries between camps, there are fewer flights you can catch and you often find that you’ll end up missing some of one or both your “arrival-day” and “departure-day” safaris.  Since you pay a lot for these camps, that’s not a good thing.

Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda are all places we’ve visited, but all of them are unusually difficult to link in with the rest of an African trip.  Kenya in particular is a problem because almost every flight to every safari camp has to originate and terminate in Nairobi.  If you want to do a camp in southern Kenya, literally in sight of the border with Tanzania, you have to fly back to Nairobi then fly on to a Tanzania destination.  Because of flight schedules, you’ll probably end up having to stay overnight near the airport in Nairobi and again in Tanzania.  Even flying from South Africa to Kenya means you have to stay a night in Nairobi, then fly on to the camps.

The flights to the camps are another issue.  The Safarilink airline that serves most camps is among the most restrictive on weight of any airline we’ve ever flown anywhere.  We’ve had to leave material in a locker in the airport to pick up on our return, when we had a camera bag and a duffle each.  I couldn’t take two cameras, always a smart move in case one breaks, because the second would put me over the weight limit.

The next problem is that because of the transportation issues, you almost have to do Kenya either at the end of an Africa trip or at the beginning, because you lose time and add intermediate hotel stays if you try to fit it into the middle.  That means, for people like us who like to fly SAA from New York to Johannesburg, you end up stringing a 15-hour and five-hour flight together.  For my wife, who has some joint issues, that combination leaves her hurting for days.

The final problem is the visa process.  Kenya uses an online e-visa program, and we applied one year and got our visas, and took the documents with us.  Thinking that was all we needed, we went to the immigration desk and handed them in, and were told we needed to go to the tables and fill out another card.  We left the visas with the agent, filled out the cards, and returned.  Nobody else was in line, we went to the same agent, and he claimed we had not given him the visas.  If I’d not kept an electronic copy on my phone, we’d have had to buy another visa.

Another time, we applied about three months prior to the trip, and my wife got her clearance very quickly.  I heard nothing on mine, and I was unable to contact anyone using any of the email addresses or phone numbers available.  Time was passing and we would have had to cancel the Kenya portion of the trip, when finally my calls to the Kenyan Embassy in Washington paid off and my visa came through.

So, we’ve decided to focus on travel elsewhere in southern Africa…and with two cameras!

We love travel, especially travel to exotic locations with plenty of wildlife and birds.  The Amazon, or at least the upper or Peruvian Amazon, seems the perfect fit, and so we booked a trip there with our favorite travel company, Natural Habitat Adventures.  It was a great trip in most ways, but the way it wasn’t is a lesson for senior travelers.

The Amazon river is the largest river system in the world, with a single tributary being the size of some of the other major rivers on the list.  In the main part of the Amazon, around Manaus in Brazil, the river can be 20 miles wide, making it almost impossible to really see and enjoy.  We had traveled to Brazil’s Pantanal with NatHab before, and on one such trip talked with others who’d done an extension cruise out of Manaus.  They didn’t like it at all, and so we passed on the Amazon till the new Peruvian Amazon trip came along.

The NatHab trip is out of Iquitos in Peru, a city in the jungle that’s accessible from the outside world only by river or air.  The river at Iquitos, and above it into the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, is narrower and far more interesting.  The reserve itself is largely marsh or underwater in the high-water season (March-May), but more ground is exposed during low water, which comes roughly when we were there, at the end of September.

The weather is obviously hot and humid, and there’s not much variation in temperature through the year since it’s only about 5 degrees south of the Equator.  There’s generally a bit less rain in the low-water period, but the water comes from up in the Andes and not from the sky, so the water levels and rainfall aren’t related.  We got lucky, with just a few heavy rains at times when it didn’t impact activities to any significant degree.

The trip is based on the Delfin II, a riverboat that can support about three dozen passengers, though we had only two dozen aboard for our cruise.  There are suites and cabins, with the former being very large and comfortable and the latter being adequate and not unusually cramped.  There are bathrooms in the cabins, but none in the public areas of the ship.  Meals are served on the second deck dining area, which is spacious, and there’s an open upper-deck bar and seating area too.

You get off (and back aboard) the ship via metal skiffs that hold perhaps a dozen people.  There’s only one seat on each side, so everyone gets a decent view.  We ran three skiffs, which meant we had plenty of space.  There are stairs in each skiff leading up to a platform in the bow, from which you get on and off.  Nobody seemed to have any real problem with the boarding/debarking process, either from the ship or ashore, and the crew was incredibly attentive and helpful.

In high water, skiffs are your window on wildlife because you can’t get ashore in many areas to walk.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because with temperatures hovering in the low to mid ‘90s and humidity of 90 to 100%, walking can be uncomfortable.  We did skiff excursions, but also did some walks, and in my view if you want to see birds, you’d make out better on skiffs.  Note though that since the skiffs were used to take people ashore, we weren’t offered a choice of walk or skiff.

Now for birding and wildlife.  There are almost no terrestrial mammals in the area, because it’s underwater part of the year.  There are birds, monkeys, and sloths, of course, and you can expect to see a lot of the first and a decent number of the other two groups.  My wife and I agreed that while the birding wasn’t as good as in the Pantanal, there were new varieties to be seen and so for birders it’s definitely a worthwhile trip.  We added quite a few lifers on the trip.

Photography is challenging.  Birds are always the hardest thing to photograph, and in the Amazon, you tend to have thicker cover to contend with, making it harder to get a clear shot and making it darker and harder to keep a decent ISO and shutter speed.  You also end up shooting many birds up against the sky, which means you need to expect silhouettes unless you do something to compensate for the backlighting.  Skiffs with people in them, moving around, aren’t the ideal camera platform either, so be patient and check your settings carefully.

Now for the issue we had.  As I said, it’s hot and humid in the upper Amazon, so you have to hydrate like a son-of-a-gun.  Our clothing was often soaked with sweat on hikes, and on the skiffs the sweat evaporated to make it difficult to know if you were drinking enough.  I probably drank 24 oz of water with electrolytes on each outing, and on some walks almost a quart.  If you have a small water bottle, this isn’t the place to bring it, and if you have any nausea or diarrhea that can combine with the heat to put you at some risk.

Which happened to us.  I got sick with both the “v” and “d” words, but I was careful to drink a half-pint of water after each episode, so while I was weak and tired, I didn’t miss any outings.  My wife got sick a day later, and in her case was unable to keep liquid down.  She dehydrated, and when they tried to start an IV aboard (they have a medical tech aboard), he couldn’t get the line in because her veins are small and blood pressure was low.  As a result, we had to evacuate her back to Iquitos, which fortunately wasn’t too far at the time.  It still took two boats and a taxi, for a combined four hours, to each the clinic.  They finally got an IV in and she recovered quickly.  We then had to stay in a fairly down-market hotel overnight because it was too dark to safely navigate on the Amazon.

The moral here is that if you know you have a problem with someone getting an IV line in you, or even have problems when someone takes a blood sample, this trip may pose some unexpected and serious risks.  My wife went from being nauseous in the AM to being on an emergency evacuation six hours later.  It was very frightening; the worst experience we had on a trip.  My recommendation is that if you have problems with IVs and aren’t good at hydrating even when you’re very nauseous, you shouldn’t do this trip.  They told me they’d have called in a float plane for evacuation had we been further upriver, but make no mistake this is out in the wild and emergency care may be hard to come by.

A number of the passengers got sick with something, and the locals (including the doctor at the clinic) blamed the malaria medication (Malarone or the generic).  They said that there was no malaria in the upper Amazon and so taking it was unnecessary, and it caused side effects.  OK, but we’ve been on probably a dozen different trips where we took Malarone, often for almost a month, and never had any reaction at all.  So, on this one trip a half-dozen get one?  I don’t think so.  If you have an anti-nausea drug you like, like Gravoll, I’d suggest you bring some and use it aggressively if you get nauseous.  Then, hydrate no matter how bad you feel.

It’s hard for me to put aside the terror that my wife’s problem caused us, but if it hadn’t happened we’d surely have said this was a very good, perhaps even great trip.  For a fit senior confident in hydration and dealing with stomach/gut issues, it would be fine.  If you have mobility problems and hydration problems and still want to see the Amazon, I’d suggest you try for higher-water times so you’re more in the skiff than walking.

People who (like me) would say they’re “real photographers” are often highly annoyed by people who take photos with their phones.  For me, the problem isn’t disdain for the smartphone as a camera but the lack of consideration phone users show those nearby.  It’s hard to even see around a bunch of smartphones held up and pointing in the direction of something, and harder yet to wade through a forest of selfie sticks in the same location.

Let’s get past that for this piece, and focus on the smartphone as a camera.  First, it’s not anything like a substitute for even a fairly modest point and shoot, and certainly nothing like a DSLR.  However, the differences may be small under some conditions, and that’s worth knowing.  In addition, there are ways a smartphone can actually do a better job than a camera.

The big problem with phone cameras is inherent in the camera.  You are dealing with a phone maybe a quarter-inch thick, and to fit a camera in that space is obviously going to require compromises.  The CCD that records the image is small, and the lens is almost always fixed-focal-length, meaning there’s no optical zoom.  The focal length is short, meaning that phone lenses are naturally wide-angle.  I did some tests on several smartphones and they seemed to have something around a 25mm equivalent focal length, with the “equivalent” meaning equivalent to a lens on a 35mm full-frame camera.  That’s certainly wide angle.

The small CCD also means that the image quality is typically lower than that of a DSLR, whose CCD is larger.  Even discounting resolution (many smarphones offer 12 megapixels, which is more than many of my early DSLRs did), the problem is digital noise, which is greater for small CCDs and in particular greater in low light.

People who use smartphone cameras often zoom in to get around the wide-angle problem, but remember that your phone almost surely does not have optical zoom.  That means you’ll be zooming by cropping, making your image resolution lower.  If you do a 2x zoom, your image resolution about half that, and so forth.  If you process pictures before using, never zoom in photo mode; it will take a worse picture than you could crop post-processing to achieve.

All this means that if you want wide-angle pictures, landscapes, whatever, you’re OK with a phone camera in decent light.  You’ll get noisy results at a lower ISO than you would with a real camera, particularly a DSLR, but many new phones will do about as well as a point-and-shoot if you avoid zooming.  Don’t try to take wildlife pictures with a phone unless the wildlife is big and acting pretty tame!

Movies are a whole different story.  A phone camera in video mode shooting 1080 HD is using about a quarter of the CCD’s resolution, so you can zoom up to 4x and you won’t have a major problem, other perhaps than holding the image steady.  The larger display on a smartphone also makes it a lot easier to see what you’re doing, and to access controls that would otherwise be unavailable.

That’s the big advantage of phones.  A nice point-and-shoot or even a top-end DSLR has a back screen that’s perhaps three inches wide, and a smartphone can have four times the viewing area.  You can pack all the main controls onto the screen, accessible by touching, and avoid having to diddle with camera dials and buttons during shooting.  People who would never use something like manual focusing or white balance or exposure compensation on a camera can use the all on their phones (but most don’t).

How much of the photo/video experience you can control, and how easily you can control it, will depend on the camera app you use.  Most new phones, and phones that still receive regular version updates, will update their camera app, but many apps aren’t designed for real photography as much as for selfies and playing around with images.  You can get real camera software from the phone’s app store.  My experience is with Android phones, and there’s a very nice open-source camera app for them–Open Camera.

Take some time with your camera app to see how to use whatever advanced features you really like, and also tune the user interface to suit your needs.  Open Camera lets you put a zoom control on the screen so you can avoid the pinch-zoom process, which I find critical if you’re shooting video.  The pinch method tends to shake the camera.  Also set your image type and video frame rate; you’ll find that most cameras will shoot better video at 1080 HD 30 fps than at 60 fps, and many won’t shoot quality 4k even if they say they will.

If you plan to shoot a lot of pictures, or especially a lot of videos, you may have to do something to manage the space they take up.  A phone that has a micro-SD slot can be used with very large cards to eliminate the storage problem.  You can also use something like Google Photos to back up your images, and even to store images instead of keeping them on the phone (Google will recover the space when the photos or videos are in the cloud).

If you want to take adventure pictures/videos with a phone, I’d recommend you get a mounting adapter that lets you put the phone on a monopod or add a vertical grip to it, with a lanyard attached.  That will reduce the risk you’ll drop the phone into the water, in front of an elephant, etc.

I use my phone for ad hoc wide-angle pictures, social shots of friends, and so forth, mostly when I can’t take multiple cameras because of weight limits (not uncommon in adventure travel).  I like the convenience of having it, but I’d still prefer a DSLR if I have the latitude to bring it, even though (because I shoot wildlife and bird pictures) I’d have to bring TWO DSLRs to cover wide-angle to extreme telephoto.  The phone saves me from the second one.

We just completed trip number nine to Africa, visiting some new countries, and I want to offer a review of the experience, with a particular slant (as always) on senior travelers.  We did Kenya (our third visit there), Tanzania, and Rwanda (first visits to each of the last two), and the experience taught us a lot even though it was far from our first African adventure.  I’ll focus on the places we’d not visited, and which I’ve therefore not reviewed before, and start with a discussion of the countries overall.

Tanzania

Tanzania is the East African country just south of Kenya, and the Serengeti reserve borders on Kenya’s Masai Mara.  The national language is Swahili, and the people are lovely though in some places less accustomed to seeing tourists than we’re used to.  The country experiences what they call “short rains” that begin in early October, and the amount and frequency of rain varies somewhat even in the relatively small area in which our three camps were located.  We didn’t have any days when rain actually impacted our adventures in Tanzania, but we did have occasional rain.

Getting to the tourist area around the Serengeti is a bit of a challenge.  You can fly into Kilimanjaro Airport from Europe and from major cities in Africa, but almost all the domestic flights are out of Arusha, an hour or so away.  If you come from another African country, you’ll often have to overnight before you can get a flight out (we did).  Internal flights are also round-robins among as many as four different camps, so the time for a flight and the length will depend on the order they take the stops, which isn’t always the same.  Don’t expect your predicted takeoff time to stay the same, or the length of the flight.  That means leaving time for connections!

We spent five days in AndBeyond’s Klein’s Camp, five days in their Ngorongoro Crater Lodge, and five days in their Lake Manyara lodge.  We like AndBeyond because the offer a nice and consistent experience.  Some of their lodges rank in our top picks in Africa (Sandibi in Botswana and Phinda in South Africa, now joined by Klein’s Camp).

Klein’s Camp is located on a private reserve adjacent to the northeast border of the Serengeti, and it’s easy to get into the Serengeti from the camp.  The camp’s own reserve is lovely, though, and there you can drive off-road and encounter few vehicles.  The rooms are on a hillside in a hilly area, and so it’s generally cool there.  The camp is not fenced, and so you do have to be careful about wildlife when in camp, even during daylight hours.  We had a small herd of elephant actually come down the hill from behind our room, and they passed on either side, with the large matriarch actually coming down our path and crossing almost within touching distance (we got into our hut’s doorway for that experience; you don’t mess with elephants!)

The airstrip is a decent distance from the camp (the camp’s own airstrip was closed because the approach passed over the Masai Mara and Kenya complained).  On the trip, we encountered our first concentration of tsetse flies, something we saw rarely in Kenya and never anywhere else.  There were a lot on that airstrip road and some were encountered in other open-wood areas during our visit, to the point where you definitely will want some industrial-strength repellant.  They don’t carry sleeping sickness in Tanzania, but they have a painful bite that will raise a pretty big lump.  Spray your socks because they can bite through them.  They like darker colored clothes, particularly blue, so be prepared.

Be prepared for cool weather in the morning and evening too.  I learned to always bring a down sweater on trips to Africa, and Linda took a fleece, but it wasn’t enough and she had to buy a down jacket in the camp.  Be sure to have a lightweight rain jacket too.  You’ll probably pull off some layers if the day is sunny as things warm up.

The animal and bird life in Klein’s is impressive.  We saw elephant, leopard, lion, wild dog, cape buffalo, and a lot of birds, including a couple that weren’t supposed to be in Tanzania at all; one was only the second sighting in the country.  We found the reserve at least as good as the Serengeti park in terms of wildlife, and we spent most of our time there.

We were birding rather far from the normal tourist paths, and we encountered villages where tourists were unknown.  One woman who smiled and waved to us at first, became frightened and ran when she saw my wife lift her camera.  We were told they think a picture “steals their blood”.  In another encounter, three children perhaps 8 or less were carrying wood when we came around a corner; they dropped their wood and ran into the woods.  They call us “mzungu”, which is a Swahili/Bantu word meaning “roamer” or “wanderer” but in common usage in Tanzania means “white people”.

We liked this camp best of all the Tanzania camps we stayed in, but logistics (see above) for Tanzania overall can be complicated!

Our next stop was Ngorongoro, the iconic crater.  This one had its ups and downs (no pun intended).  We expected the crater to be more crowded with vehicles than it was; it’s a national park so anyone can come in from the outside.  The experience wasn’t bad, but while the crater does have a nice concentration of game we didn’t find it as nice as Amboseli National Park in Kenya, and the crater area overall was very dusty, to the point where you had to protect your cameras and close the vehicle windows to avoid breathing in dirt when other vehicles passed you (which was often).

The AndBeyond lodge at the crater is lovely, with nice big rooms.  There are three levels to the lodge—North and South Camps and Forest.  I think that North Camp is the nicest, but all three are very good.  You probably see more birds from your room in Forest, but there are plenty in all the camps, and zebra, wildebeest, and even some buffalo roam the grounds, mostly at night.

Our only problem with the lodge was that they had some large groups there, one with many undisciplined children who ran wild during meals and marred what would otherwise have been a nice mealtime.

We spent only one day in the crater itself, using the rest of the stay to visit Olduvai, Empakai, another large crater with a lovely lake at the bottom, and Gibbs Farms, where you can start on a nice little hike.  You need to have a national park guide with an AK to watch over you on hikes, because of the risk of running into buffalo.

Our final stop was Lake Manyara, and this was probably our least-favorite camp of the three.  The rooms are on stilts, not as much “in the treetops” as the material suggests, and they’re thin wood/thatch construction.  There’s no air conditioning, and it happened to be hot during that part of the trip, which made sleeping (even with a ceiling fan) more problematic.  If you came back between game drives, it was even hotter at mid-day.

The national park there is lovely, and we particularly enjoyed the tree-climbing lions, which we saw nearly every day we bothered to look.  There are plenty of elephant too, though they’re a bit harder to see since there’s more woodland and you can’t drive off-road in the parks.  The only disadvantage of the park overall is that there’s really only one long road with some side-roads, and the AndBeyond lodge is located a fairly long way (an hour and a half of steady going) from the entrance, which happens to be where most of the elephants and waterbirds are found.   We had planned to go to the waterbird area on our first full day, but the road was blocked by a lion kill!

Bush babies frequent the camp area, making it one of the few places where you might get a decent look at one of these cute little primates.  There are also vervet monkeys, one of whom jumped on our breakfast table to steal fruit and scared Linda half to death!

Overall, we liked Tanzania a lot, but the logistics were more complicated and we probably would go there only if we weren’t mixing in other countries.

Rwanda

Most people go to Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas, of which only about 400 remain on the planet.  We were no exception.  It’s a lovely, clean, country that’s filled with farms and fields except in the park areas, including Volcano National Park where the gorillas are found.

We stayed at Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge, very close to the gorilla area.  The lodge is lovely, but the stairs from the parking area to the main lodge are a challenge if you’re mobility-impaired.  They plan to have an ATV path built by next year, but if you have problems with climbing stairs and paths, be sure it’s there before you book, or allow some time to make the trip.  Some of the rooms are further uphill, so ask for a low room if you have issues.

Rwanda is pretty enlightened regarding assigning people to gorilla groups for viewing; they do it based on your likely ability.  However, you can’t be sure that there aren’t a lot of less-capable hikers on a given day, or that your gorillas will stay where they are supposed to be.  Our experience proved that!

We were assigned the Sabyinyo group, a band that’s usually among the most accessible.  For it, you hike perhaps a mile and a half or two miles across fields to the edge of the park, then into the park to wherever the band happens to be.  In our case, because of mobility issues, it took two hours to get to the gorillas.  You’re allowed to spend only an hour with them, but our group was in a fairly open area and we saw a dozen different gorillas, including two big silverbacks and one three-month-old infant.  We had great viewing and got great photos.

Five minutes from the scheduled end time of our viewing it started to rain, and it quickly turned into the worst downpour I’ve been out in.  The trails turned to creeks, two guides fell, and Linda had to be carried by guides over some of the roughest spots.  Both of us had walking issues for the next several days, and we decided not to try to do the trek again the next day since we’d had a good sighting.

The lesson here is simple.  Unless you can walk for about five miles on muddy terrain with slopes here and there, and in rain or heat, this isn’t something you should be doing.  Even the “easy” gorillas can be difficult enough that seniors may have problems, though one senior we met on the trip was climbing mountains!  Know your limits here.  We were pressed close to ours, but it was a truly inspiring sight and I’m glad we got to see them.  We’d not try this again, though.

Gorilla permits have exploded in cost in Rwanda, and it’s the best place to see them.  Make sure you understand how much it’s going to cost, and again be realistic in assessing your own capabilities.  Even the easy gorillas can be hard on you.

What We Learned, Photographically, on This Trip

A lot, frankly.  Linda broke the lens mount on her Nikon 1 30-110 lens by wedging it in between the seat and the side of the vehicle.  Part of the problem was surely the wedging, but the fact that the monopod was attached probably generated additional leverage to break things.  If you use a camera on a monopod, you need to be very careful if you stow it anywhere to make sure that you don’t apply too much leverage to the mount.

On my side, this was an opportunity for me to refine my D500 technique, and I discovered after considerable testing that the best “standard” setting for the camera’s focus mode was Group Area.  In this mode you can pick up something large like a lion/leopard, and also track a bird in flight even against trees.  I was able to get a great shot of a caracal, which is a small tufted-ear nocturnal cat, even though it was dark and the only illumination was a hand light by the tracker.  ISO was 12,000 and the image was good even without noise reduction.  This proves that the D500 is phenomenal in terms of high-ISO shooting, which was the deciding factor for me.

I think group area focus might have done better for me when trying to shoot small birds in cover early in the trip.  I should have been able to get super shots at 500mm, but the contrast seemed a bit low and I think the single-focus dot crept off subject in many cased.  Group focus locks on any of the four points shown in cross-pattern in the center, which is probably better.  We’ll see.

I also noticed the big advantage that DSLR users have over those who rely on even the very good point-and-shoot style cameras.  We traveled with someone using a Nikon P900, which has phenomenal zoom capabilities, but the problem is that it’s not easy to get on the bird/animal and get a shot, and a quick shot is pretty much out of the question.  I was able to get some great shots quickly.  In all, I was very happy with my D500 and Sigma 50-500 even as my only camera/lens combination.  If you’re thinking about wildlife travel, particularly birds, I think that you might want to pay the price in dollars and inconvenience in size and get a mid-range DSLR (Nikon D5000 or D7000 family) and a nice Sigma zoom.

For 2017, we decided to do a spring trip to Africa, both to celebrate a special occasion and to see Botswana and the delta area at a time when it was in flood and also cool.  We added one of our favorite camps in South Africa (Tswalu, in the Kalahari) to the trip to round out our goal of four camps.

May in southern Africa is much cooler, to the point where the mornings are downright cold.  Expect to rise (at about 5:15 AM) to temperatures of perhaps 40 degrees or even a bit cooler, and with the wind chill of riding in open safari vehicles, it feels much cooler.  You’ll need good fleece, down, a hat, gloves, and so forth, or you’ll be truly miserable.  The days will warm up, but even on the evening game drives you’ll probably need at least a windbreaker.  We packed accordingly, and in my case I ended up taking one more layer than I needed.   A good wind/waterproof raincoat and a down sweater was plenty for me, but Linda needed a fleece besides.

Our plan was to do three camps in Botswana in the delta area.  The first, Abu, is in the heart of the delta, which at full flood we’d never experienced.  The second, Selinda, is in the north edge of the delta and our final camp (Sandibi) is on the eastern edge.  This proved to be a nice combination in terms of conditions, and I’d recommend that those looking for a good range of Botswana experiences do at least two camps, one deep in the delta and one on the edge.

Cooler temperatures in Botswana are a boon; our usual travel period (fall in the US) is exceptionally hot in Botswana, and the flood period is over so you don’t see the extensive wet and downright drowned areas you see in May.  The flip side is that the grass is high, and that makes it harder to see animals.  Harder to photograph them, too, because the camera will tend to front-focus on grass at worst, and at best you get a fuzzy image interrupted by a bunch of grass stalks.  Conditions varied among the camps, though, since those at the fringe of the delta were a bit dryer and had more “normal” grass patterns.

Abu is an elephant camp, pure and simple.  You have an opportunity to walk with and feed the elephants twice per day, though how often you elect to do that depends on your interest.  I do think that those who truly love the elephants will get the most out of Abu.  It’s not a cheap camp, and if you have only lackluster interest in the gentle giants you may not get your money’s worth.

Accommodations in Abu are a kind of super-tent, well separated for privacy.  There’s no heat or air conditioning (the latter is hardly an issue in May!) and the front of the tent is just screening, open to the sights and sounds of the delta.  You’ll hear a lot of sounds, too, ranging from ever-present hippos at night to the call of hyena or roar of lions.  Most Botswana camps are not villas of the type you’ll find elsewhere, and in a tent or open structure the sounds can be a bit unnerving to those not used to the African night.

A typical Abu day starts with a wake-up call (we always set an alarm and make coffee in the room to get started), followed by a gathering for a nice continental breakfast.  You leave from breakfast for your morning activity (drive, walk with the elephants, boat trip, etc.) and you return for a brunch at some time between about 11 AM and 1 PM depending on your own interests (and, if you don’t have a private vehicle, those of your companions).  The afternoon activity starts around 3:30 and ends somewhere between sunset and 8 PM, with the same conditions determining the exact time.  Dinner follows your return.  The food in Abu was great, by the way, and the staff is lovely.

Walking with and feeding the eles (“el-eeees” as most people call them) is the distinctive activity of Abu.  We found the afternoon walks the best because the grass was dry.  In the morning, dew often wets the grass and you end up covered with it as you walk.  During the walks, you’re between two groups of elephants, not walking next to them, which could risk accidental injury.  These are habituated and somewhat trained critters, but they’re not pets and you can’t just run up to them and rub their ears.  Pay attention to the handlers, and don’t stand in front of them if they move toward you; move aside to let them pass.

Next to the ele walks, the best activity in Abu is the boat trips.  You can run along narrow channels in high grass, and when you do you’ll encounter water birds and also elephants that are either crossing or just snacking in the water.  Often these are large bulls that have to be cozied out of the way so you can get through, and they leave a trail of uprooted vegetation that clogs the props of the boats, requiring the driver to clean things up.  It’s a dazzling setting and you’ll want to do at least one boat ride if you visit Abu.

The game drives in Abu are interesting and varied, but the flood in the delta tends to create islands and separates the critters, and many aren’t accessible by vehicle.  That means you will probably see less per drive than you’d likely see in a “dry” camp like the reserves west of Kruger in South Africa.  We did see both lion and leopard in Abu, though, so don’t think that there’s no chance for the big predators.  As a deep-delta camp, Abu is probably more impacted by limited driving space than the others we visited, which is another reason to be sure you love eles before you book; they can go anywhere, and do.  The scenery of the heart of the delta in flood is truly spectacular, though!

Our next camp was Selinda, another tented property that’s located at the north edge of the delta, on the Selinda Spillway that is the only outlet for water in the delta (it eventually ends up in the Zambezi river).  There’s plenty of bird life in the spillway, and there’s a large population of hippos as well.  The channels are wide and deep here, and we had the unusual-for-us experience of having several hippos charge the boat.  They do this by running along the bottom, and with each push-off they pop to the surface so it looks like they’re porpoising along.  The boat can outrun them, fortunately!

Accommodations in Selinda are more spartan than those of Abu.  The tents are smaller and there are fewer lights, and they are much closer together.  In fact, you can hear your neighbors, and we found this a bit uncomfortable.  The food is good, the staff is lovely, and there is a wider area for game drives because you’re on the fringe of the delta.  The routine is about the same as with Abu, and you have opportunities for both boating and game drives.

Since there’s more dry land, you cover more area and see more traditional African wildlife.  We saw lions (including feeding on a kill) and leopard there, as well as wild dogs.  There were huge herds of elephants to follow, and the usual collection of Botswana antelope.  We felt the boat trips were a highlight here as well, particularly being charged by hippos!

Our final camp was Sandibi, an AndBeyond property.  We try to stay at one or more such camps on any trip because we have a favorite (and great) African bird guide (Daryl Dell) who we can bring to any AndBeyond camp (for a fee and expenses).  We’ve traveled with Daryl so often he’s a friend, and he’s also a truly exceptional birder and a great authority on African wildlife viewing in general.

Sandibi is a truly delightful camp, one of the best we’ve found in Africa.  If we had to pick a single camp in Botswana to recommend to friends, it would be Sandibi hands-down.  The facilities are simply stunning, a kind of cross between traditional tents and villas.  The front section is entirely screened (you can pull louvered moving walls over the screens for privacy or to keep out cold/heat), and the construction looks a bit like a cross between wood and rattan.  There’s a big outdoor seating area with a plunge pool, and at least some rooms connect with a private walkway that of course you can close off if your neighbor isn’t traveling with you.

Antelope wander around in the camp, and there are many birds in camp as well, to the point where you might want to just sit on your deck and try calling some of the species you’d like to see.  The view from the camp over the wetland is awesome—a sea of grass that blows in the breeze.  You can hear hippos at night, and occasionally hyena and lion too.

The main building is a soaring structure that actually is designed to look like a pangolin.  Under the arches there’s the dining area (though many meals are served in the boma nearby), a lounge and bar, and a walkway to a high deck out over the wetland area.  You can have a private dinner out there, and it’s wonderful.

There is no boat travel option at Sandibi now (there used to be), but the game drives are absolutely wonderful.  We had more wild dog sightings there than anywhere except Tswalu in the past, when they had a pack of 19 dogs.  Today, Sandibi has a pack of 20 dogs, the largest we’ve seen anywhere, and when that large a group of dogs hunt, everything but elephants and hippos get out of the way.  Even leopards and lions won’t face them.  We also saw leopards and lions (both with cubs), including some hunts (unsuccessful), and African wild cat and civets, too.  Birding was great, made all the better by the fact that not only did we have our own vehicle and a private bird guide, but we also had the best birder in the camp as our local ranger, and a great tracker too.  All those eyes made for a great experience, and we even saw an aardvark, the first one seen in Sandibi in two years.

Our final camp was back in South Africa, Tswalu in the Kalahari northwest of Cape Town.  We’ve been to Tswalu before, and on our last trip I’d been injured (it looked awful but didn’t pose any real problems) in a vehicle-versus-aardvark-hole collision while chasing a pack of 19 wild dogs.  Sadly, those animals all died shortly afterward from canine distemper.  A new pack is now establishing itself in Tswalu; there were seven introduced but while we were there they were running as a pack of two and one of five.

Tswalu is perhaps the most different reserve in all of southern Africa.  It’s the largest, now well over 200,000 acres, and since there are only facilities for perhaps two dozen guests in all over the whole property, you rarely see others unless you’re sharing a sighting.  You find things in Tswalu primarily by tracking, though, not by being called in by others.  That means that if you’re a birder you will have to make a bit of a choice—look for birds and ignore the megafauna, or track things you want to see and bird along the way.  We did the latter.

Besides the wild dog, there are leopard, cheetah, and lion in Tswalu, but it takes a bit of effort and luck to see the first of these, and the lion are in a separate 40-thousand-acre section fenced off to let the rangers and conservationists control the predator/prey ratios and keep the main reserve safer for humans.  There are also a host of roan, oryx, and sable, and a lot of nocturnals that are rare elsewhere.  In the winter, when it’s cooler, you can see many of them in the morning or evening, sometimes even in broad daylight.

Wild dog chases are the most exciting and frankly frightening things in Tswalu.  You’re running along with the dogs, who even when not actually chasing something are often moving fast enough to make it challenging to avoid the frequent holes and stumps.  In an actual hunt, you’re flat out speeding and the tracker is calling out “Hole!” to keep the ranger on a safe line.  The dogs go everywhere, and we even followed the pack of five right past our room.

There’s no doubt what the most different thing about Tswalu is, though.  The scenery is absolutely arresting.  Lines of dunes overgrown with grasses and shrubs, grand vistas of red sand patches and green with towering hills.  Add to this the fact that if you decide to take off to look for some rare critter like aardvark or pangolin or even desert black rhino, you may well end up in a part of the reserve nobody has traveled for months.

So what did we learn on this trip?  Well, you probably need to take much heavier clothing to Africa in May (even more so in June through August).  A fleece, gloves, and a warm hat are smart.  I’ve decided to take my down sweater (L. L. Bean) on all future Africa trips because even in the spring in Africa it can get chilly if you hit a cold front.  We’ve had perhaps three trips that were distinctly chilly in the African spring period.

You also need a good flashlight.  Unless your partner likes being jarred awake at night if you visit the facilities, a flashlight lets you find your way without domestic turmoil.  It’s also very useful for walking from your room/tent to the main facility or vice versa.  Even if you have an escort with a light, it’s nice to have one of your own.  Let me say here, though, that you should never go out at night without an escort except at the times that the camp tells you are safe.  I got a Fenix UC-35, and it’s a marvel of weight, size, and power, and it recharges from a USB port so you don’t have to drag a different charger along.

The next point is electrical outlets.  The camps with permanent villa facilities have plenty of places to plug in stuff, but tented camps often have only a few.  If you have to plug in something to charge a phone or tablet and a couple of different camera batteries all at once, you can run out of options.  Add in your drier and a curling iron and it can be impossible.  We’ve found that taking a 220-volt terminal strip with three or four surge-protected outlets takes the pressure off, and since camp power can be a bit unruly, it also protects your electronics.

Finally, I learned that no matter how much I’d love to have all my cameras and lenses with me on an Africa trip, it’s not practical.  First, there are too many places where small planes mean weight restrictions, and I used to have a backpack that weighted as much as my duffel.  Second, you can’t juggle all the gear in the vehicle, and you’ll end up either tossing something valuable on the floor during a chase, or getting hurt because you’re not holding on.  Or both.  I now take one “big” camera, my D500 with the Sigma 50-500mm lens, and it did so well that other guests in the camps were asking me how they could get one.

Net-net, is May a good time to visit Africa?  It depends on your specific destination and your goals.  It’s probably as good as it gets for Botswana, weather-wise, and Tswalu when it’s a bit chilly is probably better than Tswalu when it’s about a hundred degrees.  Personal tolerance is also a factor—I don’t mind being chilly when I get up in the AM, but Linda wasn’t excited about the experience.  On the other hand, southern Africa is definitely cooler then, which can be a big factor if 100-degree heat is an issue.  For visits involving tents, I would give a nod to May.

I think we’d both go back to Botswana in May, and I think we’d both consider Tswalu in the same period.  For the rest of southern and eastern Africa, there’s a bit of a chance of rain that might make the October period more attractive.

On our latest trip to Africa we stayed overnight in Johannesburg at the Intercontinental at the airport, then stayed in four camps and spent four days at the Queen Victoria Hotel in Cape Town.  I want to offer a summary of my views on each place.

We love the Intercontinental, even given it’s an airport hotel.  The rooms are nice, the food is great, and the staff are wonderful.  We always stay a night on arrival because it gives us a buffer if there’s a problem on our flight from the US, and this year we had a 12-hour delay!  We didn’t have any real issues with connections because we’d taken the precaution of adding a night in the Intercontinental.  We’ll keep doing that, and on years where we don’t stay in Cape Town at the end, we’ll add a night to wrap up the trip too.

Our first lodge on this trip was a repeat for us, Ol Donyo, which is one of the Great Plains lodges and a Relais & Chateaux property.  It’s located in the Chyulu Hills in southern Kenya east of the Masai Mara.  It’s a fairly small lodge, housing a maximum of about 20 guests in a succession of private villas strung along the edge of a hill overlooking the plain, where there are abundant critters running around for easy viewing even from your room or while dining.  Each room is open to the outside, but a fence and ledge discourages anything from entering.  We had a gennet visit our room on one trip, but even though there are monkeys and baboons that might take a drink from a plunge pool, they don’t seem to bother the rooms if you don’t leave food laying around.

There are no other lodges in this area, so one of the wonderful things about it is that you don’t usually even see another vehicle.  We’ve spent all day roaming around looking for birds and animals without even seeing other guests.  It’s a stark contrast to the Mara area, where even in the private concessions you’ll usually see other vehicles on every drive.

We absolutely love this camp.  The facilities seem part of the landscape, wildlife abounds, and you have a sense of really being in Africa and not passing through.  It’s not an ideal big five site, though; leopard and rhino are very rare (we never saw them here).  We’ve seen plenty of the big five, and you can take a day trip to Amboseli National Park that gives you plenty of opportunity for more critters than are found local to the camp.  I strongly recommend taking a day to do this trip because the wildlife is spectacular, but be sure to be in Amboseli by about 7:30 AM latest to see the elephants coming in.  There are plenty of elephants on the property, and they regularly come to a drinking pond where they simply push the other animals away.

They might also drink from your plunge pool, which happened to us every night and sometimes during the day.  The elephants have discovered their tusks are non-conductive so they use them to push the fence down to get in, where they eat the vegetation near the pool overflow and either drink or occasionally just blow bubbles.  We even named one “Bubbles”!  Our room was number two, at the far right facing out over the plain, and if you like animals that one gets the most action.

There are some exotic animals near the lodge, including the gerenuk, which is an antelope that looks like an impala whose neck was stretched.  It’s arresting if you’ve never seen one, and they’re plentiful enough that you can see them every game drive if you like.  We also saw a caracal, a tawny cat about the size of a large-ish dog, nocturnal, and rarely seen.  In Amboseli we saw a serval, a spotted cat smaller than a caracal and also rare, particularly in daylight.

We stayed five days at Ol Donyo on this trip and we’ll probably stay a week next time!

Our next camp was the Olare Mara Kimpinski, located on the Ntiakitiak River in the Olare Motorogi Conservancy, which borders on the northeast of the Masai Mara National Reserve.  If you’re familiar with the private reserves west of South Africa’s Kruger National Park, you know that the big benefit they offer is limited access and control of vehicles.  The conservancies in Kenya are the same, but there are about five lodges in this one and so you will see other vehicles around, though there’s supposed to be a limit of four or less at a given sighting.  Sometimes that was stretched a bit!

Kimpinski is a tented camp strung along the river, with the last room (the “Honeymoon Suite”) right at the edge of two hippo pools.  If you are bothered by night noises you might want to pick a different spot here.  However, this tent is more spacious and it has a plunge pool, which is nice on a hot afternoon when the tent can be warm despite the fans.  There is electricity and running water in all the tents, but obviously no air conditioning.

We found the meals here were great, and the staff was wonderful.  Our only complaint was that unlike nearly every other camp we stayed in, Kimpinski offered a limited wine/liquor set at no charge, and you had to pay for everything else.  Something like Amarula, which we like in hot chocolate on game drives and which Linda drinks in the evening sometimes, can cost about eight dollars.

The terrain in the conservancy varies, and Kimpinski (and Mara Plains) are right in the heart of the very best area, at the river.  Other lodges tend to come in to find the predators, in particular, which is why you’ll see other vehicles on most drives.  The wildlife is good; everything except rhino is plentiful here and you can see wild dog and cheetah.  You can also drive into the National Reserve, which is great if you are visiting at the right time for the Migration and the crossing of the Mara river.  That happens in August and early September; we caught a crossing on our last trip to the Mara but not on this one, and we were only about a week later.

If you are a birder or have seen the Big Five already and you want to focus on something else, seriously consider getting a private vehicle here.  You’ll pay for it (in most camps they’ll run perhaps $400 to $550 US per day, but a specific guide will be as much as $1,000 per day), but it’s worth it.  Most visitors to the Mara area want to see a crossing (which you may not see even in the peak August timeframe but which will eat up a lot of waiting time nevertheless) and the Big Five, and so birding will be down on the list for a shared vehicle.

We liked this camp a lot, and unless we find another with a plunge pool and electricity, we’ll probably return here.

On the South Africa part of our trip, our first camp was Leadwood, part of the Exeter camp complex that at the time we made reservations was managed by andBeyond.  The camp has now changed management to Dulini, but it’s still an andBeyond partner property.  It’s located at the junction of the Sand and Mabrak Rivers in Sabi Sands, west of Kruger.  On this trip, the Mabrak was dry and the Sand river was a trickle, but wildlife was still abundant in the river area.

There are only four villas here, each with three sections (living, bedroom, and bath) and a deck and plunge pool.  Room 1 sits on the Mabrak side, alone to the left of the main area as you face the river, and the other three sit to the right.  That makes Room 1 the most private and most visited by wildlife; we had an elephant and some antelope drinking from our plunge pool.  The decks are outside the fence, so be careful going out after dark.

The meals here were great, and the staff and management were incredibly committed and enthusiastic.  We had a private bird guide here, and he ate with Linda and I apart from the other guests.  They accommodated this arrangement quite well, partly because there are four different places you can eat in the main lodge area.  All of them have a view of the Sand river, and you may see leopard stalking around after dark.

What sets all the Sabi Sands properties apart is the Big Five viewing, and in particular leopards.  We saw all the Big Five by 9 AM one morning and we saw nine different leopards in a single four-day visit.  Sabi Sands is a bit of a patchwork of reserves, some of which have transit agreements, and you will see other vehicles on your game drives.  Generally they try to control how many show up for a given sighting, and if you get lucky (or your ranger and tracker are good!) you’ll have some great ones to yourself or share them with a single vehicle.

We like Leadwood the best of all the Sabi properties, even more expensive ones like Londolozi or Mala Mala.  We’ll be making this our standard Sabi spot on future trips.

Our last camp in South Africa was Jabulani, which is located in the Kapama game reserve, near Timbavati or Hoedspruit, northwest of Kruger.  We stayed here a couple years ago, in large part because it has a resident herd of elephants rescued from various places.  This was the last year for elephant-back safaris there, and we wanted to do it again.  The lodge is another of the Relais & Chateaux category, and food and accommodations were great on our last trip.  Sadly, we had some issues on this one.

We’d booked a private guide for birding here, as we did everywhere else on this trip.  Our ranger was a nice guy, knew African animals well, and had a fair knowledge of birds as well.  The problem was that he’d been in the lodge only two weeks, and so he was forced to refer to a map to find his way around and ask directions of other vehicles.  This tended to distract him from looking for birds, not to mention getting us lost and late to some sightings or activities.

The second problem was that while we’d reserved our room over a year in advance and asked for a specific room (Jabulani, the one furthest from the main facility) we ended up in Room 3, closest to the main lodge.  That, in my view, is the worst room in the camp because of the noise from the lodge and from people coming and going.

The final problem was the menu.  We were asked on arrival for any dietary restrictions, and we told our ranger that we didn’t eat any game, nor would we eat baby animals (lamb, veal) or duck.  We preferred chicken, seafood, pork (except pork belly; too fatty), or beef.  We also told the male half of the camp manager team, and yet we had only one option we could eat for the first dinner and none for the second.  When we complained to the female manager, she said we should have told the chef.  Why, then, ask for dietary preferences?  Anyway, once that was straightened out we had great dishes.

After some reflection, we told our travel agent and suggested we’d wasted the money for a private vehicle here.  The agent asked for a refund of the charge, which camp management refused.  The agent then contacted the owners, who agreed to the refund.

We loved the elephants here.  We loved our experience on elephant-back, all the more for the fact that this is the end of the last year it’s offered.  We loved watching them bathe in a pool.  The dining and room staffs were great, but the camp’s new management was a problem.  I doubt we’ll come back here unless there’s a management change.

We wrapped the trip up at the Queen Victoria Hotel in Cape Town.  The hotel sits on a small rise across the road from the waterfront area of Cape Town, just a short walk from the Victoria & Alfred where we’d stayed the last couple of times.  The V&A was undergoing renovations so we decided to move, and we loved the Queen Victoria so much we’ll stay there from now on.

This is a small hotel, with perhaps 35 rooms.  The best are on the top floor facing out toward the waterfront or 90 degrees clockwise toward Table Mountain.  We had a room (1304) that faced both, with extensive balcony space.  We didn’t dine at the hotel except for breakfast, which was a very nice buffet, and we had them pack a lunch for us while birding, which was also excellent.

The nice thing about this hotel is its combination of view and access.  You’re closer to the waterfront attractions, restaurants, and shops than the Cape Grace where we stayed our first time in Africa, the location is quiet (unlike the V&A which can be noisy if it’s a weekend), and the view from the top of the small hill is better than you’d get from anything lower down.  The staff was excellent and helpful too, and we’ve already booked our return.

Good accommodations, particularly good lodges/camps, are hard to come by and if you want to get a good room in a good place you need to book far in advance.  We book over a year ahead, and even then don’t always get exactly what we want.  If you’re planning a trip to Africa and want the best outcome, remember that timing issue to avoid disappointment.

Well I have made it back from Africa Trip Seven, and I think I’ve learned some important things on my ever-favorite topic of cameras.  The short story is that the Nikon D500 with the Sigma 50-500mm lens turns out to be just about the perfect camera for safaris.

This particular trip involved two camps in Kenya (Ol Donyo, near Amboseli, and Olare Mara Kimpinski in the Masai Mara) and two in South Africa (Leadwood, in Sabi Sands, and Jabulani in the Kapama reserve northwest of Kruger).  I’ll review these camps in another post.  We also stayed for four days in Cape Town at the Queen Victoria.  The weather on the trip was drier and colder than usual for Africa; we’d been to all these geographies before at about the same time of year, and we were surprised by the difference.

Animal sightings on this trip were the very best we’ve had in Africa, which of course means that any camera issues had the potential of messing up a good thing.  If you’ve followed my photographic sagas, you know that I have been experimenting with the best camera for safari use.  I’ve had great shots with the combination of the Nikon 1, an FT1 adapter, and a long telephoto lens (the new Nikon 80-400 and the Sigma 50-500) but there were issues with the precision of autofocus, particularly in low-contrast situations or where the subject was smaller than the focus square.  The Nikon 1 also has limited ISO capabilities, and so I decided to try the D500.  With the 50-500 and its 1.5 crop factor, this gave me a 75-750mm equivalent, and the camera was supposed to have the best autofocus of any of the enthusiast models and good noise performance as well.  As a safety measure, I also had the Nikon D750 (full-frame) and the Nikon 80-400mm lens.

I didn’t need it.  I shot about a thousand pictures with the D750, but primarily because I wanted some images at the highest possible resolution for printing.  I think I could have taken them all with the D500 and been quite happy.  This new model is simply amazing, and I want to outline what I think the key benefits are for a wildlife shooter.

At the high level, the big difference with the D500 is autofocus.  The engine is extremely fast and accurate, to the point where I got shots that I would never have believed to be possible at all, and surely wouldn’t have worked even with the D750.  What’s good about it is manifest in the auto-area mode, which is so accurate that it even often picked out the correct subject in a messy field and was able to pick up and track flying birds, even small ones.

One specific example shows the benefit.  We were birding in the Western Cape and a capped wheatear was displaying for a mate.  This is about the size of a large-ish sparrow, and this one was jumping up from a fence post about 50 feet from us.  I was able to pick the bird up in the air using auto-area focusing and track it for multiple shots during its display—all of them were in focus.

Auto-area isn’t perfect even on the D500; a very small subject or a lot of clutter can fool it.  Switching focus models isn’t a major issue with any Nikon but it’s not instant—unless you take advantage of another D500 feature and assign a feature button to switch focus modes.  You had assignable feature buttons on the D750 but not to switch focus modes at a push.  With the D500 you can make at least the top feature button into a switch-me-to-9-point button, which gives you a center focus point and some tracking in all directions.  With this I could hit a specific and small focus target if auto-area picked the wrong thing, and do it in a push.

Another very helpful feature of the assignable buttons is the ability to set spot metering at a push.  Birds and other critters are often backlit and you don’t have the option of asking them to reposition themselves.  Spot metering will usually get you a serviceable exposure in these situations, again just by pushing a button.  This makes it possible to quickly address backlit critters, which would be much more difficult if you had to change metering mode on the fly using the conventional approach.

I did have some D500 issues, both of which have been mentioned online.  One was the “Card Error” problem and the other a seeming tendency to overexpose some shots.

On the Card Error, I never had an issue writing to the card but when I tried to delete the last image shot, I sometimes got the message that the card was bad.  I was shooting to the XQD shot, but I think the problem really comes from the fact that when you delete the last XQD image the camera then displays the first image on the SDXC slot, which is where the online reports say the problem arises.  UHS-II cards apparently have an issue, and Nikon has a temporary fix in place for it in a firmware update, which I’ve downloaded but not tried.  I only had the problem rarely, so it will take some time to see if it was fixed.  In any event, turning off the camera and popping the card out then re-seating it cures the problem.

The exposure thing is a bit murkier.  I noticed that in some situations the camera would overexpose images by about .7 to 1 stop, but it wasn’t consistent.  It doesn’t seem to be matrix metering because I switched to spot and center-weighted and they did the same thing.  I just set exposure compensation and that resolved it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a firmware update for this in the future.

Frankly none of this matters to me.  The camera did such an amazing job and the problems were so easily resolved that I won’t hesitate to recommend the D500 and in fact on future trips where I have stringent weight limits, I’ll probably make this my only camera.  I’m also seriously considering selling off my Nikon 80-400 AF-S since it doesn’t add anything significant to my capabilities.  The same for the Sigma 180 Macro I have; I can get close shots with the D500 and the 50-500.  There does seem to be a clear value to the Nikon 17-55mm I have, even though it’s a DX lens, because it becomes a 25.5-82.5mm on the D750, a nice complement to the 50-500 which is 75-750mm on the D500.  My Nikon 1 10-30mm gives me 27-81mm but with only 10MP and at a lower ISO.

I’ll keep you advised of my views as I process all the shots!