I made it as a finalist in the BeenThere monthly travel photo comp for April 2011.
The theme was Weather and, although I didn’t win, the winner and runner-ups were worthy victors.
My entry is below:
The photo also appears in my photo galleries at Buggslife Photography.
Selous Game Reserve – on paper Africa’s largest protected wildlife reserve. This is where we chose to polish off an unforgettable wedding/honeymoon trip.
Staying at Lake Manze camp we had just 3 nights to explore as much as possible. Although Selous covers more than 5% of Tanzania’s total area, in reality the majority is a hunting reserve and just a relatively small area north of the Rufiji river is kept for ‘photography hunting’ or eco tourism.
From the small Coastal aeroplane I spotted my first giraffe and within the first 20 mins of the gradual drive from the airstrip toward camp my wildlife spotting senses were already in overload. Plenty more Giraffes and Impala seemingly in a any view you chose from the jeep; and it was the view that struck me hard…
Usually our nature driven trips have been to tropical rainforests and we are well used to have no more than a couple of metres visibility both left and right with the only distant view being ahead down the path your are walking (and even that depends on how well and straight the paths have been cut). So sitting in an open 4×4 Landrover and looking not just forward for a km or more but all around to both sides and seeing mammals off on the horizon – this was a whole new ball game in our mildly obsessive wildlife watching world.
What stood out to me as much as the game viewing was the birdlife, not just in quantity and variety but in beauty. the Rollers and Bee-eaters have such striking colours but then also the 5 species of Kingfisher we saw, the number of raptors (from Osprey to Sea Eagle, falcons and so many vultures) and even the common passerines were interesting; perhaps not surprising being our first ever visit to Africa so all was pretty new and fresh.
One of the main reasons we chose Selous over, say, the Serengeti or Ngorongoro, was for the relative peace and quiet of the reserve. During most drives we only saw up to 2 cars passing by and never another vehicle whilst watching an animal – the one big exception being on the final evening when we went out to observe a pride of lions with 2 males (brothers). In that instance it probably resemebled the hoards that you hear about in Kenya or North Tanzania since we had 3 or 4 jeeps at one time in the same area.
The two the major attractions of Lake Manze camp were:
1) It is situated on the lake so you can mix up the activities by taking boat safaris. This really gives you variety; the birding was superb and the viewpoint is always different from the water.
2) The camp is not fenced, you are staying in extravagant tents which means that wildlife can, and does, come right up to.
As well as having Impala and Monkeys within 10m we also had two special moments. I never realised how silently a big elephant could sneak up on you! One lunchtime we were relaxing on the tent porch when he appeared through a bush. As he came closer we went inside the tent and watched through the mesh window as he virtually brushed up against the canvas! The Masai do look after you but hadn’t noticed this one so we just enjoyed the experience and let the elephant get on with his stroll. In the bush everybody and everthing makes way for the elephants.
The other moment was during the night of a full moon; in the middle of the night a storm had passed over with a typically heavy tropical downpour. Afterwards I had been awoken again but by a different sound, a sound of munching. As it approached I could see moonshine but could not distinbuish its outline until my eyes adjusted to its great size and traced the outline of a large bull hippo under the moonlight! He edged closer, regularly tearing huge amounts of grass and munching away. Imagine the sound a cow makes when tearing up grass, now amplify that 50 times. We watched this hippo as it stood as close and can be just a metre fromt he tent side. Everytime we made a slight rustle it would stop, listen out and everntually carry on his midnight feast. Everybody always says how dangerous they can be and having seen them running on dry land the previous 2 days I could well believe it.
Our first time in Africa, our first Safari and at the end of our honeymoon after a special 2 weeks that included a wedding in Zanzibar. A great way to polish of a great trip for 2 newleywed nature lovers.
Many more nature images have now been added to the galleries over at Buggslife Photography. All photographs are taken by photographer David Bugg who specialises in nature, wildlife, landscape and travel.
Just launched a new project on buggslife photography – in short I am looking for people to rate a set of 10 photos – I’ll then compare results after 4 weeks or so…
So please go ahead and give your opinions here!
On a geeky techy side I am using a star rating system from Addrating.com that lets you customise colour etc of 5 stars and stores results using a javascript widget…
Inspired by the Milestones Project that I glimpsed at Manchester Airport last night I have just added a new gallery to buggslife photography:
It will update itself automatically as new content is added to the database…
Buggslife Photography now has a section of photo galleries especially for new fresh material. The New Photos galleries are up and display albums for new shots (taken in past few months) as well as recently added and also any new albums from all other categories.
The galleries will automatically populate themselves so it’s a handy place to check back from time to time.
I’ve started up a new project combining Poems with Photos. At the moment I’ll use my own poems until my back-log runs out…the first 3 are now up at http://poems.buggslife.com/.
I feel I should apologise for getting technical but I cannot resist sometimes…this is a technical review / test of my favourite lens, a 50mm prime at SLRGear.
Olympus Lens: Primes – Olympus 50mm f/2 Zuiko Digital Macro (Tested) – SLRgear.com!.
Results are superb. I recently bought an Extension Tube (Olympus EX-25) which I’ll be testing on the 50mm soon and will post results…
I was happy to hear I have had a photo shortlisted in a competition. It’s run by Photobox and is called:
‘Around the World in 80 days competition’.
They have had around 28,000 entries and mine appears among 50 shortlisted within the category ‘Europe: Living’. You can see the images via this link – mine is captioned Portugal and is in the bottom left corner, one up from the very bottom.
Winners are not announced until this Friday – to be fair, there are other good photos in there but it was interesting to get noticed all the same.
Just added Indonesia photos to the Travel section at Buggslife Photography.
Last weekend I celebrated my 30th Birthday with my closest friends in a barn in Swale Dale, in the Yorkshire Dales (North Yorks).
Here are a couple of snaps taken during the walk into the hills of Upper Swaledale on the Saturday: Rain Storm - Swaledale
Walkers take a break
There is a small Lead Smelting ruin above Healaugh by a brook (according to the sign the hills contain rich veins of lead ore):
I’ll add the storm and this last one to the weather and landscape galleries.
The barn was Low Row bunkhouse (camping barn) partly run by YHA – a great option for a heavy session over 2 nights.
On the way there we passed through a beautiful plateau with a fantastic viaduct – I think it’s called Ribbleshead Viaduct – with low cloud all over the hills the scene looked great:
Note for tecchies: the post processing on the 2nd photo was simple using Lightroom 3: used ND grad tool and desaturated lower section, desaturate rest of picture slightly then up individual colour channels for red, magenta etc to bring out the heather colours…geeky yet simple.
Took a few shots at a mate’s gig last night at Zanzibar, Liverpool.
Here’s one, the rest are up on buggslife.com – click the photo:
Secret Garden Gathering gig - Zanzibar, 31st July 2010.
I have just managed to assign music to a slideshow for the first time! If you load this gig slideshow it should start up with a track from the band that they only recorded in the studio 8 days ago!
I like it when modern technology works like this.
For any tecchies – I am building my photo galleries using SlideshowPro for Lightroom along with Director, which uses an SQL database (hosted on my host server) to store and manage the images.
Caught a great wildlife moment cycling home from work last Friday.
A stoat was taking out a big rat…the screeching from the rat caught my attention and I managed to get one rushed shot:
Stoat attacking Rat
I then lay by a wall waiting for the stoat to return and finish it as the rat was still breathing but could hardly move and, sure enough, he did pop out to inspect my bike, dance around and disappear again once he spotted me. Unfortunately at that moment I had my camera set up facing the rat!
After much filtering and editing (in Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 Beta) I have finally completed my gallery of travel photos from one month travelling a few corners of Bali and Java.
Enjoy the whole set at:Indonesia travel photo gallery. View from Sanur beach at sunrise - Mt. Agung
The main areas in Bali are Sanur, Ubud, Mount Batukaru and Bukit including monkeys and surfers at Uluwatu. It was during the Balinese Hindu New Year – Nyepi – and features heavily on its festivities. One of my favourite moments – particularly in a photographic sense – was Melasti on the beaches of Sanur at dusk and dawn.
In Ubud you’ll see many shots from the Ogoh-ogoh parades as well as a sense of tranquility on Nyepi itself.
The other shots were from 3 weeks on Java – about 10 days of which were in the south western tip (Ujung Kulon in Bahasa Indonesia) in the remote and wild national park of coastal rainforest, mangrove swamps and idyllic islands, beaches (storm worn yet untouched by man) and tropical seas including superb coral reefs. Ujung Kulon National Park Rice paddy terraces in Bali on hills of Gunung Batukaru
Inland in the central areas of Java you will see Jogyakarta (Yogya), a popular traveller’s base city nestles between famous volcano peaks and surrounded by many historical ancient religious sites such as Borobodur. I also feature shots of Candi Sukuh – a lesser known Hindu site on the slopes of the sacred mountain Gunung Lawu east of Solo. Sukuh features numerous sexual and erotic references in its carvings and symbolic temple structures.
That’s just a flavour – there are also numerous wildlife photos among them along with candid portraits and, of course, many rice paddy landscapes…perhaps too many!
I have been working on a few aspects of my Buggslife.com website which is now online but still in early development stages. The main focus of the site is the photo galleries.
At the moment I have 3 sample galleries up:
The latter covers almost everything from weddings to music gigs, macro insects to panoramic landscapes, sunrise, sunset, street graffiti and everything inbetween. A lot of focus will be on nature including wildlife and countryside with a slant toward travel photo journalism.
I intend to add more and more galleries throughout this summer so keep checking back and enjoy.
