I have recently written three stories about travel in Burkina Faso, a land locked country in the Sahel Region of West Africa. In 2014 I traveled there and had an amazing experience.
Here are the first 3 stories:
@leifasaur/the-painted-village-of-tiebele-in-burkina-faso
@leifasaur/open-air-rock-museum-burkina-faso
@leifasaur/the-most-bizarre-museum-in-the-world
Today I am taking you on another photographic journey of Nazinga Game Ranch. This was about a half day drive from Tiebele, we just moved along the Ghana, Burkina boarder from East to West.
The reserve was started at the end of the 1970s by two Canadian brothers, who combined conservation, and research to restore the area to its wild wonder. Their success caught up to them though as jealous people in the government turned sentiment against them and accused them of being part of a coup attempt. They were forced to move to the capital a year before the project was due to turn over to public management in 1989. Since then the the park has run down and poaching is abundant again. It is an important part of a series of national parks in Burkina Faso and Ghana, that allow for migration of animals particularly Elephants.
I spent two days there and took a driving safari as part of it. Here are the picture of the place and wild life I got to see along the way.
Cattle Ranching is abundant around the park.
There is one hotel at the main entrance, but everything was quiet and mainly deserted and the pool was empty. I don't know if it was the season or just the way it is. I know that Burkina Faso is not really at the top of the list for tourist destinations and this is pretty far off the beaten path. It was also in June which is the rainy season. Roads are better and it is often easier to see wildlife in the dry season as watering holes are fewer and more animals congregate at them.
There are a series of resiviors in the park and the road goes along the spillway making for an interesting driving experience. The scene above is the last of one of one of these dams before reaching the camp in the middle of the park we were staying in.
Some Rooms at the park.
The reservoir in front of the camp attracted all kinds of wildlife and birds in abundance.
We also had some more cheeky visitors.
Taking pictures of wild animals is very challenging. Trust me I had a lot of photos and I have just this handful that are somewhat presentable to the public. Light constantly changes, sometimes you are shooting into the light other times away from the light. You have to be fast you do not have time to be messing with settings on the camera. You will need to be shooting from a telephoto lens. I shot most of these with a 75 to 300mm lens. when shooting with a big lens you get less light capture, also it is very easy to get a blurry image from shaking. You are shooting from a vehicle sometimes moving and very shaky, this also limits the panorama you get or the direction you can shoot. When there are trees and brush around too between you and the subject they will also become blurry because they are at a different focal length.
In the pictures above there is a picture an antelope surrounded by trees and shrubs. It looks almost like you are looking through a tunnel of shrubbery to see it. That is because it is the only thing in focus the rest is out of focal length. This picture turns out great because of that effect like it is framed by the rest of the picture.
There is another one of a momma with two younger dear, the two youngsters are in focus but the mother is not, this is a challenge of using a very big zoom lens. But this lens I used was not expensive and quite slow, meaning the light passes through it slower than much more expensive ones, so you can minimize these effects with better glass.
Another challenge is keeping your equipment dry, and clean of dust the environment is very challenging. You will not want to be changing out lenses on the fly much because you will not want to expose the internals of your camera to the the dust and the inner lens.
The motorcycle tour crew coming into camp.
Next time we will explore Ouagadougou and then we have finished for what I have for images of Burkina Faso.
Shot with a Conon Eos Rebel and a Sigma 75-300mm lens