“Watch the birdie!”
Happy New Year!
If you’d like to know a little bit more about what I’ve been up to as a photographer in the last 12 months, I’ve put together this summary.
Tanzania & Kenya
Overall, it’s been a stand-out year for me, and that’s all down to the four months I spent teaching photography in Africa.
I have to say it was a dream of an opportunity, and it would never have come about but for an article I happened to read online about a photographer who’d managed to get himself 365 free nights accommodation in Africa in exchange for his pictures.
“I could do that!” I thought to myself, so I Googled ‘safari lodges in Kenya and Tanzania’, sent off around 50 emails, and, within just a couple of weeks, I had 17 invitations!
If you don’t ask, you don’t get…
Out of all the options, I chose &Beyond and Cottar’s because they also wanted me to teach their guests photography, which meant I could stay for a lot longer.
I ended up working for three months at &Beyond camps in Tanzania, mostly at Klein’s Camp in the far north on the Kenyan border, but also at Grumeti Serengeti Tented Camp a bit further west and Serengeti Under Canvas, a mobile camp I visited for a few days here and there at Ndutu and then Seronera.
On 28 May, I moved to Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp in Kenya, where I stayed until the end of June. The deal was that I would get free board and lodging throughout in exchange for copies of my best wildlife shots and my time teaching and hosting the guests.
I also had to pay for my flights and around £3,000 of park fees while I was at Klein’s. If you ignore the rather expensive 800mm lens I had to buy (because Lenses For Hire wouldn’t lend it to me for more than three months), that meant I effectively had a four-month safari for the price of a week!
In total, I spent 122 days in the Serengeti and Masai Mara, going on 163 game drives and taking nearly 90,000 pictures.
I kept a list of all the species I saw, and in the end it came to 60 different animals and 208 birds.
My rarest sightings were of a rhinoceros and a pangolin at Cottar’s, and I also saw three kills - one by a leopard, one by two cheetah and one by four male lions.
The lion kill was the most spectacular - definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I was only a few yards away as first one and then all four male lions attacked a female buffalo. I was machine-gunning away with my Nikon while one of the guests took a few videos…
Three’s A Crowd
My daily routine generally revolved around two game drives, a long one in the morning from 0600 or 0630 until lunchtime and a short one in the evening from 1600 or 1630 until dinnertime.
We generally had breakfast in the bush, and lunch and dinner back at camp were generally good, particularly at Grumeti Serengeti and Cottar’s.
(I lost a bit of weight at Klein’s when I generally only had a main course for dinner, but I put it all back on at Grumeti Serengeti and Cottar’s when I was treated to a full English breakfast every day followed by a delicious three-course lunch and dinner!)
The rest of the time I spent working on my photographs.
I never liked to go on a game drive without editing my pictures from the previous one, so I ended up very, very busy. I was on game drives for around nine hours a day, and every hour of shooting required another hour of post-processing, so that meant I was usually working 18-hour days!
Apart from all that, the experience was made so much richer by the staff and the guests. Nothing is too much trouble when you’re on safari in Africa, and I ended up becoming close with a few of the guides and drivers.
The guests were also lovely people (with only a couple of exceptions!), and I enjoyed experiencing the game drives with them and then eating with them in the evening.
Due to a kind of self-selection process, they were almost all wealthy, successful, well educated, intelligent people with a shared passion for wildlife, and we had some good times together.
The only disappointment came when guests didn’t want me to come with them on their game drives. It only happened a few times, but it was a bit of a blow to my ego!
I have to say at this point how grateful I am to &Beyond and Cottar’s for giving me the opportunity.
My main contacts at each company, Claire and Karen, were both very helpful in sorting out all the logistics, and the only thing that really went wrong was when we couldn’t get a park fee waiver for the Serengeti.
That was disappointing - and expensive! - but my bank stepped in to save the day by providing me with a crucial loan.
All in all, it was a great trip, and I hope to be able to do something similar in future on a regular basis. I don’t have any confirmed plans for next year, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed…
[For more articles about my stay in Africa, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.]
Other news
I had a pretty good year in terms of competitions. None of my shots made it to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum, but I did win a few awards from magazines, including BBC Wildlife, Digital Photographer, Dodho, Outdoor Photography and Wild Planet.
I even won a £500 voucher for Opticron equipment as well as a pair of hiking boots and a few smaller cash amounts.I gave various talks or slideshows, including a couple at Grumeti Serengeti Tented Camp, one at Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp, another at Putney Library and one at the Athenaeum for the Oxford University Society.
I taught a couple of half-day photography classes for Canary Wharf, and that led to an invitation to help judge their latest wildlife photography competition.
That was my first experience as a judge, and it was very enjoyable. I met some lovely people, and it was a nice change to be able to sit and discuss the merits of the entries with a few friendly and like-minded individuals.
We generally agreed on all the ones that didn’t make it to the final round, but the shortlist was quite tricky to nail down, and there was some argument about the eventual winners!
That didn’t matter, though. It was all very good-humoured, and I hope I’ll be invited back next year, either as a coach or a judge or both.I sold over 3,000 images through stock agencies in 2019, and although I only took part in one exhibition, I also had a few print sales.
One came directly through my website, which was nice, and I sold another on Etsy, but I was very surprised when I found out that I’d made six sales of one of my leopard shots through an exhibition run by the Greatest Maasai Mara Photographer of the Year.
I’d entered the competition a few times, and that particular picture was shortlisted, but I didn’t realise it was going to be displayed around the world! In the end, the exhibition went to Seattle, Brisbane, Melbourne, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Dubai, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas and Indianapolis, and I ended up making nearly £1,000.I rent out some of my equipment on a site called Fat Llama, and I made a few hundred pounds out of that, too. Every little helps…!
2020
I don’t have any firm plans for 2020 although I’d like to be able to spend a few months in Africa again. I might be able to go back to Cottar’s in October, and I’m talking to one or two other safari lodges in Namibia and Kenya, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I’m due to lead a trip to Botswana and Victoria Falls in July, but that depends on finding enough guests to make it financially worthwhile. Fingers crossed, and all the best for 2020…!
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.