Planet Earth 2

Posted on by

I finished watching the BBC’s Planet Earth 2. From a photographer’s perspective it was, of course, an incredible achievement. I enjoyed watching it immensely. You could grab dozens of 4k frames from the best sequences – of snow leopards in the Himalaya, of lions hunting a giraffe, of Komodo dragons fighting – and have a career’s worth of classic images. At such time as mere mortals can capture raw video at 4k or higher resolution it’s clearly the way to go for fast moving wildlife spectacles. (As long as you can nail focus, which even the BBC crews failed to manage on occasion!)

I thought the single best sequence was that of snakes pursuing iguanas on the Galapagos. Apart from being a genuinely new (and somewhat horrifying) thing to see, the coverage and editing here really did create the “cinematic” feeling that was apparently one of the goals of the show.



The use of new technology was a mixed bag. The very extensive deployment of remote cameras fleshed out the snow leopard sequence and was essential for telling a story, but the human-shot footage of leopards fighting was the highlight. And the use of drones was more sparing that I expected. If you’re the BBC, you have the resources (and ability to gain permission) to seek new unobstructed angles from the air for days on end, but that ability wasn’t really showcased here.

Where Planet Earth 2 disappointed was as a set of films. Whether deliberately or not, the individual sequences worked best as You Tube clips, and could have been edited together in random order to almost interchangeable result. If there was any guiding creative vision behind the series it was certainly not evident in the banal narration, which while avoiding the worst of the anthropomorphism seen in some previous series did little beyond furnishing a random collection of interesting facts. In southern Africa, we saw tourist T-shirts everywhere with the cliched nugget of wisdom:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn

In search of lions

Posted on by

I’m not yet over the thrill of seeing lions in the wild. A leopard or a cheetah may be harder to see, and equally beautiful, but nothing stops traffic in one of Africa’s parks as surely as a lion. Visiting Kruger national park in South Africa, and Etosha national park in Namibia, we saw lions on about half a dozen separate occasions. Rather than just post the best images I obtained, what follows is a chronological list of our sightings in an attempt to give an idea of the sorts of different pictures that are possible. In that spirit, there’s deliberately no great consistency in the processing I’ve applied!

Lions are nocturnal, and if one’s sole goal is to see a lion a game drive at night is a good option. You’re not allowed to blunder around after dark yourself in either Kruger or Etosha, but some of the Kruger camps offer guided night drives in open sided vehicles. These leave shortly after dark, and give you typically a couple of hours during which both guide and visitors scan the roadside with spotlights for wildlife.

Leaving Skukuza rest camp in Kruger on our first day in the park, a pair of lions stood on the verge no more than a mile or so outside the gates.

lion1

In addition to spotting the game, the guides on one of these excursions give a commentary on what you’ve seen (normally after the vehicle has stopped, photographs have been taken, and the animal has moved off into the bush). I’ve done guided drives before in Denali and in Yellowstone during winter, and it’s a similar experience. In Kruger, one of our guides suggested that lions hang out near the paved roads because prey, fleeing in panic, will often slip trying to cross the tarmac. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but it’s certainly the case that our lions showed very little inclination to head into the bush. Despite the presence of a large vehicle, filled with tourists doing a terrible job of keeping quiet, they walked along as the vehicle kept pace without paying us very much attention.

lion2

Later that night, we found a second small group resting at a waterhole.

lion3

This kind of sighting is a tough gig photographically. For some reason I’d supposed that the spotlights on a safari vehicle would be extremely bright, but they’re not. The above images are at ISO 6,400 and 12,800, at shutter speeds as low as a tenth of a second. High ISO and image stabilization are essential, and even then you’ll likely be looking at black and white conversion and / or a slightly arty look.

During the day lions will often be resting up. In Kruger, even during the dry season, there’s quite a bit of undergrowth, and a resting lion is hard to spot even at quite close range. A lion jam of cars on the road is more conspicuous, and we caught fleeting views of lions on a couple of occasions that way. Mostly you end up not with artistic glimpses of a lion, but simply obscured and unsatisfactory images. We waited for the lions to get up, move out of the undergrowth, or in fact to do anything, but a fed and watered lion is not in a hurry during the day.

lion4

Moving on to Etosha national park in Namibia the quest changed completely. Etosha in the dry season (we visited in mid-September) is very dry, and predators and prey alike are guaranteed to be found in the vicinity of the park’s waterholes. Driving up to Nebrownii on our first day in the park a pair of lions sat on one side of the water, while springboks, giraffes and onyx milled around uncertainly on the other side. Some of the park’s lions are fitted with tracking collars (typically males, and one of the females in a group), but apart from that the environment is much more open and easier photographically than in Kruger.

lion5

The scene at Nebrownii changed as the morning wore on, slowly. A jackal came to drink, and eventually departed. A giraffe, either paralyzed by fear or desperately thirsty, approached the water at an agonizingly slow pace before eventually deciding not to risk drinking. A third lion came to the water on the other side, prompting the springboks to retreat to some invisible line demarcating safety.

lion6

This is probably my favorite image from the morning.

lion7

Around noon, a trio of elephants appeared on the horizon and made their way to the water. The lions gave them plenty of space, but there were plenty of opportunities for pictures that – if not actually showing interactions between elephants, lions and giraffes – at least had them in the same frame.

lion8

lion9

After a break for lunch, we returned to the waterhole. Variants of the same scene were still playing out. This lion looked a bit thin.

lion10

Photographically, our best images came on our last day in Etosha. Entering the park from the south as the sun rose, lionesses were grooming each other next to the water while a male lion – unfortunately tagged – sat nearby near a fresh kill. The image below was shot at long range… 400mm on a Canon 7D cropped sensor body.

lion11

After maybe ten minutes, the lionesses got up and followed a trail that crossed the road just in front of our vehicle.

lion12

I kept shooting, but took care to also just enjoy the experience of seeing these magnificent cats at a range of no more than ten yards.

lion13

South Africa and Namibia

Posted on by

I’m back from two weeks in southern Africa, the photographic portion of which included stops in Kruger National Park, Etosha National Park, and the Namib desert. The trip was actually a honeymoon, so we planned it more to get a taste for a new (to us) part of the world than to get photos… but still we made plenty of pre-dawn starts and came back with a hefty haul of images!

I’ll likely post more detailed reflections on the trip once the dust has settled and my evaluation of the images can be separated from the emotions of seeing leopards, cheetahs and lions in the wild for the first time. For now here’s a taster of some of the sights.

Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

Giraffes, Kruger National Park

Giraffes, Kruger National Park

The Namib desert

The Namib desert

At the waterhole, Etosha National Park

At the waterhole, Etosha National Park

All of these photos were taken with a Canon 5D Mk3 and the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 II lens, both of which performed superbly throughout the trip.

A weekend in County Mayo

Posted on by

A spur of the moment weekend in Westport, on the west coast of Ireland. The weather was typically “Irish”, i.e. pretty terrible, but this is still a wonderful part of the country to explore. The road along the coast here is dubbed the “Wild Atlantic Way”, and for once the tourist designation is spot on.

Doolough valley, County Mayo

Doolough valley, County Mayo

Coast, County Mayo

Coast, County Mayo

Where the wild ones are

Posted on by

The wildest hiking in North America is surely to be found in Alaska and northern Canada. There are plenty of challenging hikes in the mountains and canyons of the lower 48 states too, of course, but in most cases the difficulties owe a lot to either the length of the trail or the need for technical climbing or canyoneering skills. In the icy north, by contrast, the sheer remoteness is such that only a handful of hikers tackle even the easiest non-technical hikes in some of the region’s National Parks.

My own experience in Alaska and northern Canada is limited to day hikes and short backpacks in Alaska and the Yukon. In the course of planning those trips, however, I’ve read of plenty of other hikes that piqued my interest. Here are five that – although I may never get around to them – look like incredible adventures that could be tackled by mere mortals with appropriate planning…

Kluane’s Donjek Route

Kluane National Park, in Canada’s Yukon, is a park I’ve actually been to. With my brother we hiked the park’s most popular trail, the Slims West route to Observation mountain. The scenery was outstanding, the level of adventure (mostly arising from the unbridged crossings of glacial creeks) significant but manageable, and it remains the best hike I’ve done to date. The video below (refresh the page if the embed isn’t visible) gives a taste of the terrain.



The Slims West trail, however, is not even close to being the most adventurous thing to do in Kluane. There’s exceptional rafting on the Alsek river, while staying on foot the Donjek route to view the Donjek glacier may well be one of the best backpacking trips in North America. The route is only about 60 miles, but it’s recommended to plan for 8-10 days in the wilderness. There are no major technical difficulties, the main challenge is the remoteness and the need for careful route finding in the trail-less portions of the hike.

The Goat Trail, Wrangell-St Elias National Park

The day hikes out of McCarthy in Alaska’s Wrangell-St Elias national park have been on my to-do list for many years. Going beyond those, there’s what looks to be an excellent short backpack that crosses the Root glacier and returns to town via the Kennicott glacier. That looks doable, but I’d want to have more experience on the ice than I have right now to feel comfortable planning it. Easier in some respects (though not in others!) is the The Goat Trail, probably the best-known longer hike in the park. It’s a fly-in / fly-out route between two bush airstrips that looks to access spectacular scenery, and which for the most part is relatively easy. There are, however, some potentially tough creek crossings, along with the route’s signature difficulty of a scree slope traverse that requires finding the right trail to accomplish safely. I’m confident we could do this hike, though it would be a step up in challenge compared to anything we’ve done up to now.

McGonagall Pass hike, Denali National Park

The closest you can get to Denali along the park road is near the Eielson visitor center. If the weather is favorable – often it’s not – a short hike to the top of the ridge above the visitor center affords an amazing vista of North America’s premier mountain.

Denali from the Eielson Ridge

Denali from the Eielson Ridge

It’s hard to see that view and not want to get closer! It doesn’t even seem that hard. From the visitors’ center, it looks like you could simply hike down to the valley bottom and climb up the other side to get a better view. There’s no trail, however, and experience elsewhere in Alaska and the Yukon makes me think that such a plan is likely foolhardy