Hide and seek…

Apart from an evening in the Brazilian Pantanal and an afternoon in Namibia, I never really had a chance to use hides to photograph wildlife until I visited South Africa in June 2024. Kambaku River Lodge had a hide beside a waterhole with gimbal heads for guests’ cameras, and Kings Camp had a similar facility—except with a very low ceiling!

I was delighted with my experience using the hides, and there are plenty of others I’d like to visit, including Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana, Lentorre Lodge in Kenya and Zimanga in South Africa, so I thought I should write an article about how to get the best out of them.

Why?

The first and most obvious question to ask is why. Why use hides at all? Why not go on game drives or walking safaris? You see the same animals, so what’s the benefit?

Well, the answer is that hides are a great way to get eye-level shots of animals and birds at waterholes—and time is on your side. One of the difficulties of going out on game drives with other guests is that they can be very impatient!

If I’m waiting for a lilac-breasted roller to take flight, it might take a few seconds, but it might take 15 minutes or more! That’s far longer than most people are prepared to wait, so I normally end up feeling guilty about being so selfish—and some guests even complain to the lodge!

None of that happens when you’re in a hide. You can spend as long as you like down there, and you’ll usually be on your own, which gives you the freedom to do whatever you like.

When?

You can spend time in hides during the middle of the day or in the evening—and potentially all night! The hides in South Africa had power outlets, comfortable seats and even a Nespresso machine, so I spent pretty much every waking moment there except when I was out on safari.

The normal routine at a safari lodge involves an early morning game drive from around 0600 to 0900, an optional walking safari after breakfast and then an afternoon game drive after lunch from around 1530 to 1900, followed by dinner.

If you don’t go on the walking safaris, that leaves an awful lot of time to kill, so you might as well go to the hide. You can even have your meals there. On my final night at Kings Camp, there were four white rhinos at the waterhole, and I didn’t want to miss any of the action, so my guide brought me dinner in the hide!

Which Lenses?

Most hides you come across will be designed with the needs of wildlife photographers in mind. The one I visited in Brazil had a strategically positioned dead tree in the middle of a small clearing around 10 yards from the hide, and the guests were able to set up remote flashguns to help them photograph the ocelots at night.

The ones in South Africa were both next to artificial waterholes that were around 10-15 yards square. That meant I could use my 600mm lens for the birds and smaller animals, such as the scrub hare, but I needed to switch to my 70-200mm lens for the larger mammals, including impalas, white rhinos, Cape buffaloes and southern giraffes.

It’s great to be able to use two camera bodies with wide-angle and telephoto lenses because you never know what’s going to show up. You can also use your smartphone to take videos, of course. Most of them now offer 4K footage and a wide-angle lens that makes it easy to capture the larger animals, such as giraffes.

The other thing to bear in mind with lens selection is the maximum aperture. It was f/2.8 on my Sony 70-200mm lens but only f/4 on my 600mm. That wasn’t a problem during the day, but it was so dark after sunset that I could only really use my wide-angle. The extra stop of light suddenly became very important in keeping the ISO down!

Which Settings?

During the day, your settings are going to be pretty much whatever they would be on a game drive or a walking safari. There’s plenty of light, so you don’t have to compromise on your shutter speed or ISO. The problem comes after sunset when it suddenly gets very dark…

I wasn’t used to shooting from a hide, so it was a real learning experience. The manager at Kings Camp was able to pass on a few suggestions from his son, who was a wildlife photographer, but I still needed to experiment.

My starting point was to shoot wide open in manual with auto ISO (as I usually do), but the problem was that the light levels were so low that my ISO was far too high—even at 1/125 of a second.

Modern cameras are pretty good at dealing with noise, but I was having to shoot at 6400 or even 12800 ISO, which was far too high. It was time for a different approach…

One trick to lowering your ISO in low light is to use the doubling rule. The idea is that you start off with a quick burst at a ‘safe’ shutter speed that’s guaranteed to get you a sharp image—even if your subject is moving.

You then halve your shutter speed and take twice as long a burst as you did before. The slower shutter speed is going to lower your hit rate, so you need to take more shots to give yourself a decent chance of getting a sharp result.

After that, you can continue halving your shutter speed and doubling the length of the burst until your subject leaves the area (or you get bored!). Later on, if you review your images in reverse order, the first sharp image you come to will be the one with the lowest ISO.

It’s amazing what sharp results you can get using this method—even at shutter speeds as slow as 1/25 of a second (see Dark Meat above). It helps if you can use a gimbal head on a tripod, but even a beanbag will do. The IBIS systems on top mirrorless cameras these days can manage up to seven or eight stops of stabilisation, so all things are possible.

It’s not an exact science, and there’ll be times when you end up with blurred images because the animal or bird has suddenly started moving, but it’s a good start. It works especially well at a waterhole because the wildlife comes there to drink, which means your subjects are likely to remain stationary as long as they’re there.

One thing I noticed is that my Sony ⍺1 always seemed to be shooting at 12800 ISO. It was pretty dark, but the images seemed underexposed, so I had a look at my settings.

The problem was that 12800 ISO was the default limit when shooting in auto ISO. As I was setting my aperture and shutter speed manually, that meant the camera had nowhere to go. It couldn’t raise the exposure by raising the ISO, so it had to make the photos too dark.

As soon as I realised what was going on, I changed the ISO auto maximum to the highest possible value, which was 102400. That solved the problem. A noisy, sharp shot always beats a clean, blurred one (or no shot at all!), so I never want my camera trying to ‘help’ me by limiting the ISO.

How to Edit?

Again, if you’ve been shooting during daylight hours, your post-processing should be just the same as usual. However, you might need to reduce the noise levels in shots taken before sunrise or after sunset.

If your camera technique has been good and you’ve used the right settings, you should be able to ‘rescue’ images taken at ISOs all the way up to 3200, 6400 or even higher. My current favourite program for noise reduction is Lightroom, and I use the Enhance feature on all my Raw files.

If you don’t have Lightroom or you don’t shoot in Raw, you can always experiment with Photoshop or Topaz Labs Photo AI. Just make sure you don’t make your shots look unnaturally smooth. A little noise or grain is fine, and you want to maintain detail in your subject.

Verdict

And that’s it! I hope you get a chance to visit a hide somewhere in the world and practise your low-light technique. Hides offer a great chance to get eye-level shots of animals and birds that can often be skittish and just plain hard to find.

Shooting from a hide is a good way to pass the time during the day if you don’t want to laze around the pool, and it’s surprisingly easy to take good shots even after sunset. Just remember to pack a variety of lenses for different subjects and use the doubling rule to limit your ISO. After that, you should be able to remove any remaining noise in post.

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

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