In October last year (2018) I was lucky enough to spend a few days on Safari in the awesome Chobe national park. Having never photographed wildlife before I did a lot of reading up to prepare and it really paid off as you’ll see from the gallery below. From all the tips and advice I read, I can recommend:
- A decent sized zoom lens, 300mm worked well for me. I hired a Sony FE 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G OSS for my NEX-5n
- A few memory cards, rotate them on each safari drive so that is something happens to one card you don’t lose all your photos (you’ll also take a huge amount photos – I took about 3 and half / 4 thousand)
- 3 or 4 batteries, so you’ve always got spares – you don’t want to keep turning the camera on and off as you’ll miss the photo opportunity
- A lightweight bag that you can slip the lens into when you’re not taking photos – it keeps the sand and dust off the lens and saves you the hassle of having to use the lens cap
- Burst mode is your friend and should be the default shoot mode – it’s easy to delete photos than not have the ones you wanted
I was incredibly lucky and got see some amazing wildlife. Chobe is famous for Elephants and it didn’t disappoint along with Leopards, Buffalo, Hippos, Zebras, Giraffes, Hyenas, Wild Dogs and a huge range of birds. I also saw plenty of lions and a once in a lifetime exclusive seat for a lion hunt and kill. Below are a few photos from the thousands I took that hopefully brings it to life.
