JHP Newsletter - 2005, No. 2, 16 March
Greetings from South Africa! It's great to be back in Africa again.
Equipment: Sigma 120-300 f2.8 APO EX IF HSM
I'm pleased with the Sigma 120-300 f2.8 APO EX IF HSM I bought just before going to Africa. It worked well in Rwanda for the gorillas, and I really appreciated the extra speed compared to the Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6 L IS USM. The faster lens, and the ability to increase the ISO through the magic of digital capture, let me capture vastly more usable images than I did in Uganda in 2002. The lens is also holding up much better than my only prior third-party lens, a Sigma 50-500 F4-6.3EX APO RF for my Maxxum 7 — it still feels like it did right out of the box. However, the gap in coverage between 300 and 500mm has created some compositional challenges, something that was very rare when shooting with the 100-400 and the 500.
The gap could be reduced by adding a 1.4x converter to the 120-300. However on most of this trip, in order to prevent dust from accumulating on the sensor, I've kept the 1.4x II converter permanently attached to my 1D Mk II so I can switch between the 120-300 and the 500 w/o exposing the mirror chamber to the elements. Some dust did get on the sensor at the beginning of the trip, maybe because I accidentally, and out of habit, used the lens-release on the body instead of on the 1.4x II converter when changing lenses once or twice. In a somewhat ironic twist, I've been using my 1Ds Mk II almost as a backup body for most of the trip, and have had my 28-135 almost permanently attached to it.
The exception to this camera setup was Rwanda. Because dust wasn't really an issue, and because I wanted to get the highest-quality images that I could, I used the 1Ds Mk II exclusively. The slower frame rate of the 1Ds Mk II compared to the 1D Mk II wasn't a problem, but the smaller buffer size was — I maxed out the buffer several times while trying to capture the action. On the whole, I'm glad I shot with the 1Ds Mk II because I got lots of great images with a whole lot of data in them.
Travel: Africa Introduction
My African safari began at the end of January with three back-to-back photo safaris with McDonald Wildlife Photography: two weeks in Tanzania, one week in Rwanda, and two weeks in Kenya. I probably got as many useable images from this month spent in East Africa as I got during my previous two or so months in Africa! I'm currently on a self-drive tour of South Africa, and will describe that leg of the journey in the next newsletter.
Travel: Tanzania
The Tanzania safari was excellent, and it was great to be back in Africa. The main goal of the safari was to see wildebeest births in the Serengeti. We started with three nights in Ngorongoro Crater, a place I had visited in 2001. On the first morning there, we saw two wildebeest give birth w/in 10 minutes and 10 yards of each other!! They were 20-30 yds from the road (No off-road travel is allowed in the crater.) in short grass, and no other animals were crowded around them. In other words, it was perfect for photography!! Unfortunately, something happened to the images I took in the crater, and I will have to wait until I get home to try to get good data. Anyways, just seeing the birth was really cool because I had never seen anything be born before. It was really funny to watch the young ones learn to walk — something they did w/in 15 minutes of being born. It's definitely a survival tactic because the young ones have to get up and follow their mothers and the herd or else they'll become someone's meal.
Then we went to Serengetti National Park, and stayed for two nights in the Seronera area, an area in the center of the park that I had also visited in 2001. Then we stayed for eight nights in a luxury mobile tented camp near Lake Ndutu in the southwestern part of the park. The large, flat plains between Lake Ndutu and Naabi Hill are used by the large herds of wildebeest to give birth every year, and it's possible to drive off track in this part of the park allowing much greater flexibility. For the first time, I was able to experience the sense of "siringet," the Maasai (native) term for "land of endless space." The Seronera area has scattered brush and trees, and the far north of the park where I had also been in 2001 has some open plains, but nothing compared to the area between Lake Ndutu and Naabi Hill where there is almost flat grassland for about 400 square miles with hills on the horizon. When we arrived, the herds of wildebeest and zebras were on the periphery of the area, and increased the vastness of the space. By the last three days of the visit, the plains were filled, so at times there were animals from horizon to horizon — an incredible spectacle.