Yesterday I had breakfast and was in the classroom for 0700 for the first of our photography workshops. They were run by Etienne Oosthuizen who is quite a well known wildlife photographer. The first couple of sessions were pretty much just theory based, learning about the ISO, aperture and shutter speed and a few other bits. We had brunch of sausages, sweetcorn fritters, bean salad and salad and then spent a couple of hours studying in preparation for this weeks tests.
At 1400 we began photography workshops again, this time we practiced a few of the techniques he showed us this morning, using various subjects by the classroom, the swimming pool and the sable by the dam.
We managed to persuade the trainers that a Game Drive would be beneficial to help us practice so at 1600 off we went. We saw some impala, a beautiful bird (a lilac breasted roller), a herd of wildebeest with a baby suckling, zebra, giraffe, a waterbuck, a couple of jackals and we bumped into the other group.
We had our drinks break with one of the other groups which was nice.
Even though it was cloudy the sunset was beautiful and I played around a bit with my camera.
After our drinks break we were treated to a very brief sighting of a leopard, it was in a tree but climbed down and left when the spotlight went near it, but it was definitely a leopard! What a great bonus Game Drive!
We drove back to camp and had chicken pie, sweet potato and salad for dinner. I showered and then we had one more photography workshop – using torches to make ‘light show’ photos and star photos. My photos of the stars aren’t amazing, but they are definitely stars and at least now I know how to do it! I went up to the classroom for a bit and then went to bed.
