Applepie

Yellow weaver bird

One of my favorite photos from my Tanzania Safari is a series I took of yellow weaver bird in the process of making its nest. I had about 60 seconds to photograph this bird. I plan on making a large print out of the collage below.

Serengeti National park, Tanzania
EOS 1DS II, 500 f/4L w/ 1.4x Tele
Shot at 700 mm, ISO 800, Aperture priority at F5.6, 1/80s

There is something about this photo...

I don't know what it is, but the photo below has a captivating effect on me.

The photo was taken in Tanzania, at the Selous Game Reserve on June 7th, 2006.

Canon 5D, Shutter Priority, 1/250 sec, F/10, ISO 200, at 400mm

Quote of the week - It was an ugly performance...

"It was an ugly performance but it was what we wanted and we'll take ugly performances" David Beckham commenting on England's victory against Ecuador.

Photographing Fireworks

The Digital Photography School web-site has a list of helpful entries on photographing fireworks.

I plan on having a go at it this 4th of July, if the Seattle weather cooperates.

Tanzania Gallery Posted

I finally got around to posting some safari photos on my photo web site - check it out.

Tanzania - By The Numbers: Updated

Originally, I had selected 1142 images from my African Safari (out of 8412 photographs taken). The initial selection was done the day after my return from Tanzania. 2 weeks later, I took another pass over my 1142 selected photographs and trimmed them further. I now have 858 photographs, with 152 of them being of people, lodges, and stores. Leaving me with 706 wildlife photographs.

The 284 photos cut from the original selection were mostly repeats from other photos, very few were cut from a technical or photographic reason.

Overall, I am very happy with the outcome of the trip. My original goal was to have 12 great photographs, and I feel that I got at least 50 awesome shots - enough even for an iPhoto book!

Tanzania - By The Numbers

My safari lasted 15 days, 12 of which were dedicated to photography.

Below is a breakdown of the photos I took, and which cameras and focal lens I used.

Number of photographs taken:

8412 photos, an average of 701 photos per day.

An average of 14.82mb per photo, and a total of 121.76 gb of storage used.

1149 photos made my selection for family members (13.66% of all photos taken)*

300 photos made my selection for friends.

100 photos will make it into my web gallery.

5 photos are good enough to be made into large prints (20"x30").

Cameras used (excluding purged photos):

618 taken w/ EOS 1DS II

531 taken w/ Canon 5D

Focal length used (excluding purged photos):

1000 mm: 17 photos (500 f/4L w/ 2.0x tele)
0700 mm: 223 photos (500 f/4L w/ 1.4x tele)
0500 mm: 199 photos
0400 mm: 208 photos

350-399 mm: 14 photos
300-349 mm: 34 photos
200-299 mm: 78 photos
100-199 mm: 144 photos
050-099 mm: 85 photos
024:049 mm: 147 photos

439 photos used the 500 f/4L lens (plus tele-converters)

A total of 647 photos were taken at 400mm or above.

Note: during 3 days in Selous, I was not able to use the 500 f/4 as all photo opportunities were hand-held. If it weren't for this case, there would have been even more shots done with the 500 f/4L.

The 13.66% keep rate is accentuated by multiple shots taken of the same animal looking for the right tail flick, eye expression, etc...

Rebooting - The Wind of Changes

How do you eat an Elephant? One bite at a time.

Tanzania - Fantastic!

I just returned from a 2 weeks photography safari to Tanzania. The trip was fantastic! I will blog about my experience over the next few weeks. In short, we woke up on average at 5 am and went on a daily ~12h photography drive, taking on average 700 photographs a day.

The one tip I have for anyone planning a similar trip is to take at least 3 times the amount of disk storage that you think you will need. It is amazing who much disk space a couple of Canon 5Ds and one EOS 1DS II can consume in a single day. I kept having a recurring dream of finding an Apple store in Tanzania to purchase additional HD space - not good.

For anyone who loves wild life photography this was a dream trip - we did nothing but photograph every thing day, all day, for 14 days. We were completely unplugged from the world, no internet, no newspapers, no radio, no TV. Our whole focus was on photography.

We visited 5 major Tanzania National Parks, and in the end I had captured "The Big Five".

I will post some additional photos to my web gallery in the next few days.