New gallery posted - Kolmanskop, Namibia

I have updated my Galleries section on my main andybiggs.com web site, and the newest gallery is entitled Kolmanskop.

Kolmanskop is a deserted mining town in the southwest corner of Namibia. The town developed after the discovery of diamonds in the area in 1908, and was there to provide shelter for workers from the harsh environment of the Namib Desert. 

The town declined after World War I as diamond prices crashed, and operations moved to Oranjemund. It was abandoned in 1956, and the desert has taken over its place as the rightful owner. Kolmanskop is popular with photographers for its scenic settings of the desert sands reclaiming this once thriving town. Due to its location within the restricted area of Sperrgebiet of the Namib desert, a permit is necessary to enter the town.

Here are few select images from the gallery. Click here to be taken directly to the gallery. Keep in mind that my print prices are heavily discounted until the end of the year, in case you would like one of these images on your wall.

John Paul Caponigro will be leading a photographic safari to Namibia in September, 2010. Click here for details.

Luminous Landscape Video Journal #19

The Luminous Landscape has just released their Video Journal episode #19, and this issue includes an amazing amount of video footage from our Namibia safari from April 2006. There are other great segments, as well, however I was most interested in seeing the video from our Namibia trip.

We visited 4 different locations in Namibia on that trip: Kolmanskop, Namibi Rand, Sossusvlei and Serra Cafema. LLVJ #19 contains more than 46 minutes of footage from that incredible trip. Michael and I waited to do an on-camera discussion about the trip until we were out on safari again, and that didn't happen until last September when we were in Botswana together. Yes, our Botswana safari should eventually be a Video Journal piece, as well.

As a side note, I do have a safari again to Namibia next September 2010. My friend John Paul Caponigro is leading the trip, and there is still some space available. We have no specific plans to return to Namibia beyond next year, so if you are planning your 2010 vacation or holiday schedule, this could be your ticket.

Click here to see a quick preview.

Click here for the LL checkout page to purchase the video (I have no financial interest in this or any of the videos on Lumionous Landscape).

Click here to see my September 2010 Namibia Photographic Safari.

Workshop Testimonial: Stephen Starkman

Stephen Starkman recently traveled with me and John Paul Caponigro to Namibia, Africa. Stephen was kind of enough to share his exceptional photographs with me, as well as his testimonial. Thanks so much, Stephen!

As a side note, John Paul will be returning to Namibia next year in September 2010 to lead another Namibia landscape workshop. I will be formally announcing the workshop in the coming days, however I have already posted the itinerary online:

Namibia Photographic Workshop with John Paul Caponigro

September 20-30, 2010

"..Andy, I cannot thank you enough for all his hard work putting together our workshop in south and central Namibia. You are a man of exceptional talent and infinite patience (well, almost infinite!). You are also an incredibly talented photographer, as is evident in the pages on your website. I wouldn't hesitate for a minute taking another workshop with Andy. Andy - we all had a blast - and now some exceptional photographs to show for it!"

Himba Women of Namibia

Himba Women

Namibi, Africa. April 2006

Canon 5D, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, 1/250 @ f/6.3, ISO 250

Sony A900 and lenses - Namibia trip summary

I know it has been a few months since I have returned from my 3-week Namibia trip, and I have even been back on safari in Botswana in the meantime, but I thought I would throw together a quick summar of my feelings of the equipment that I used on the trip. So here goes.

I always travel to Africa with my Gura Gear Kiboko camera bag, as I started Gura Gear precisely because I was tired of all of the same old camera bags on the market. All are too heavy, uncomfortable, overpadded and not well thought out. My Kiboko bag allows me to not only get my gear to my locations in a lighter fashion, but it also allows me to have multiple cameras attached and ready to shoot from. This is accomplished by dividing the center of the camera bag into two separate 'butterfly' sides. In my Gura Gear Kiboko bag I carried the following:

• Sony A900 24mp SLR (x2)
• Sony 16-35mm f/2.8 Carl Zeiss
• Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 Carl Zeiss
• Sony 70-400mm f/4.5-5.6 G
• Extra batteries
• Compact Flash cards (112GB worth)
• Fleece jacket
• Marmot Precip shell for wind protection
• Filters
• Hat
• AMOD GPS tracker

And there was still more room left over. I have to fess up and say that I had an experimental version of the Kiboko bag with me, and it was a different size than the standard Kiboko bag. Was it larger or smaller? Only time will tell!

On this safari I opted for simplicity, and I didn't want to take extra gear with me. In hindsight I think it was a good choice but also a bad choice. Sony graciously loaned me a great set of cameras and lenses, and I had to choose what to take and what to leave at home. Here are the additional lenses that they sent to me that I did not take with me:

• 50mm f/1.4
• 135mm f/1.8 Carl Zeiss
• 70-200mm f/2.8 G
• VG-C90AM portrait grips for the A900 cameras

So let's dig into the details a little bit. My most used lens on the trip was the 24-70mm f/2.8 Carl Zeiss lens. It pretty much sat on one of the A900 bodies for the entire trip. It is built like a tank (a good thing), and performs exceptionally well. I really have nothing but praise to say about the lens, other than some vignetting when approaching 24mm in conjunction with a polarizing filter attached. I tried swapping out my polarizer for another traveler's slim polarizer, and it didn't make much difference, unfortunately.

The second most used lens was the 70-400mm f/4.5-5.6 G. This is a great lens, and is pretty much a blend between the Nikon 80-400mm and the Canon 100-400mm. Let me explain. Canon users pretty much hate the 100-400mm for its push-pull zoom design, as well as its optical quality over about 300mm. However, it does do a good job at autofocusing. The Nikon 80-400mm is optically decent and has a traditional zoom ring for zooming in and out. However, its great downfall is its atrocious autofocusing speed. Well, the Sony 70-400mm takes the good from both of those lenses and combines everything into 1 lens: good autofocusing speed, good optics and a traditional zoom ring. Pretty cool. The one thing that I really love about this lens (and also the 70-200mm f/2.8 G) is its lens shade. The lens shade has a nifty sliding door on the underneath side so the shooter can easily rotate a polarizing filter from underneath. Pretty cool!

The Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 with the slot on the bottom of the lens shade

The one thing that I don't think is necessary is the 70-400mm lens is painted in silver. Not my favorite color for a lens. I think they should match the same white color as the 70-200mm.

When we were shooting in high wind situations I really wish I had brought the 70-200mm. Why? Because the 70-400mm has a long barrell when zoomed out to 200mm or more. This barrel is slightly wobbly, and I ended up with many unusable images in these situations. I should have brought the 70-200mm in addition to the 70-400mm for this reason, as well as the lens is optically superior at equivalent focal lengths and at similar f/stops. The 70-400mm could have been used for wildlife and the long shots and the 70-200mm strictly for landscapes.

The 16-35mm Carl Zeiss lens was mostly used for people grab shots, and also at Kolmanskop ghost town. I found the lens to be every bit as good as its competitors from Nikon and Canon. The lens is also built in a similar way as the 24-70mm f/2.8 Carl Zeiss, which is a good thing indeed.

And now we get to the Sony A900 camera bodies. I first used the Sony A900 cameras on my polar bear trip this past November. My first impression was that Sony really hit the nail on the head with the product, as it had great specifications at a very competitive price. The A900 reminds me of how I felt about my old Nikon F100 in that it just feels good in my hands. After shooting with the A900 for 3 weeks in the desert, I am very glad that I wasn't carrying around the extra weight of a professional camera from Nikon or Canon. For landscapes the A900 is really about as ideal as a camera can get. The file size and quality is excellent, the ergonomics works well and the lenses cover everything I will ever need. There are some glitches, however, in that some of the buttons are difficult to reach without lifting an entire hand off of the camera. A good example is the ISO selection button is tough to reach with either my thumb or my forefinger. This is a small nit, for sure. One thing I love about the Sony system is the approach to handle image stabilization / vibration reduction in-camera. This means that *all* lenses are image stabilized. Very nice.

Looking forward into a crystal ball I can see reports that Sony is working on a super telephoto lens. This has me very intrigued as to the future of Sony and how it will play a part in wildlife photography, as well as sports photography. I am going to seek out other Sony cameras other than the A900 to see if there are other camera bodies that have better low noise characteristics, as this is something I rely on quite often. ISO 400 is now my starting point, ISO 800 is my late afternoon setting and ISO 1600 is a requirement at the end of the day. Heck, ISO 3200 and 6400 is a joy on my Nikon D3, but I recognize that no other cameras will be able to match this. I also don't shoot that many images at those higher sensitivities, so this isn't really a big deal to me.

I want to again thank Sony for loaning me some great equipment. It is a shame that I didn't take the time to use the 50mm and 135mm lenses, as they seem to be excellent performers as well. The 135mm is the one lens that I would like to try, as the build quality is top notch.

Namibia trip report (Part 5 - Namib Rand and Wolwedans)

This is the 5th trip report from my latest safari to Namibia You can read my Namibia trip report (Part 1 - Skeleton Coast) entry, Namibia trip report (Part 2 - Serra Cafema) entry, my Namibia trip report (Part 3 - Namib-Naukluft) and finally my Namibia trip report (Part 4 - Lüderitz and theSperrgebiet) if you have not already done so.

After two successive mornings of shoots at Kolmanskop, it was time to fly over to the NamibRand reserve, one of the most beautiful locations in Namibia. The NamibRand reserve has some excellent wildlife, albeit sparse. This is one of the areas where you one can take wildlife-scapes of gemsbok (oryx) amongst green and yellow grass and also small red sand dunes. We spent two nights at the luxurious Woldedans Dunes Lodge, and it was a great opportunity to spend some time photographing landscapes, as well as some wildlife. On our only full day in the area, we had overcast skies for almost the entire day. This made landscape shooting a challenge, however soft light is actually a positive as long as you don't include the sky in your photographs.

From an equipment standpoint, the area lends iteself to longer lenses for both the wildlife and the landscapes. The Sony 70-400mm lens was on my camera most of the time, and the images that I captured need a fair amount of processing for me to be happy with them. Given my schedule as of late, I suspect this will get punted into August or September before I have the time to work on them. Kind of sucks, but I am working hard on Gura Gear business, running a safari in Botswana and doing color consulting work for Moab by Legion Paper.

Wolwedans Dunes Lodge, amongst the red sand dunes

The Mars-like landscape of the NamibRand. We had an amazing show of light and clouds on our first evening.

The dining area at Wolwedans Dunes Lodge.

Cheese.

Namibia trip report (Part 4 - Lüderitz and the Sperrgebiet)

This is the 4th trip report from my latest safari to Namibia You can read my Namibia trip report (Part 1 - Skeleton Coast) entry, Namibia trip report (Part 2 - Serra Cafema) entry and finally my Namibia trip report (Part 3 - Namib-Naukluft) if you have not already done so.

After Sossusvlei and the Namib-Naukluft Park, the first safari group and I flew back to the capital city of Windhoek. I said goodbye to everybody and headed back to the Olive Grove for some relaxation, laundry service and emails. After a few hours I saw some of my next safari group, and I went back to work and went back into 'host' mode.

The next morning we headed to the airport to board our private charter to Lüderitz, along the southwestern coast. Lüderitz is an unusual place, as it still has the colonial German feeling to it, and it is quite isolated. It is bound by the coast to the west, the impenetrable sand dunes to the north, and the Sperrgebiet diamond mining around to the south. There is only 1 major road in and out. The primary reason to travel there was for us to photograph the abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop. Kolmanskop (established in 1908) was not a huge town, but it was definitely a modern town in its heyday. It had electricity, a gymnasium, bowling alley and many other creature comforts of home.

On this trip I had a clearance issue for a 'working photographer' in the controlled diamond mining area, so the images below were pulled from some of my prior trips. There was some confusion as to who had applied for the work permit to operate there, so rather I put my camera down and helped my workshop participants instead of shooting.

The challenge with photographing at Kolmanskop is the extreme dynamic range. This is a great place to practice your HDR skills, however I have never liked any HDR output from my own efforts. For some reason I just don't like the look, and I would rather clip a highlight or have deep blacks, as it looks more realistic to my eyes. The abandoned buildings are an excellent study in reflected light, and there are extremely bold colors inside many of the homes. Most of my exposures from my visits to Kolmanskop are between 1 and 5 seconds with a 16-35mm lens. The Sony 16-35mm f/2.8 lens is head and shoulders better than the Canon 16-35mm series I or II, and almost as good as the Nikon 14-24mm, even though they aren't the same focal range. The Sony 16-35mm is also as good as my Nikon 17-35mm, which I use for most of my wild angle needs. For anybody traveling to Namibia, Kolmanskop is the only location where I have gotten away with a smaller tripod. All other locations are subject to winds, and a smaller tripod just doesn't work everywhere else. On this trip I brought my Gitzo 3540. My first trip to Namibia back in 2006 I brought a Gitzo 1258, and I quickly switched to a larger model after that.

Colorful streets of Lüderitz! It certainly doesn't have a feel of Africa when you are walking the streets. Many or most of the street names are still in German, not Afrikaans, English or any other local language.

Relic of the past

This image took some playing with to get what I wanted. There was so little light inside, and we threw sand up in the air to get the lines of light to be sharp and visible.

The tunnel effect? I was trying to capture soft, dappled light that was reflected all around the room.

I love this particular house, and I have photographed it many times now. I have tried both vertical and horizontal compositions in the rooms, and I never can get to a point where I am happy with either. This time I had the early morning light crossing over the sand in the background, which was a nice touch. Notice the intricate, hand-painted stenciling near the top of the room. Just amazing how nice their homes must have been in the middle of nowhere.

Power switch. Ah, nothing like power in the desert.

Namibia trip report (Part 2 - Serra Cafema)

This is the 2nd trip report from my latest safari to Namibia You can read my Namibia trip report (Part 1 - Skeleton Coast) entry here if you have not already done so.

After the skeleton coast, we flew along the ocean and turned inward at the mouth of the Kunene River, which markes the boundary between Namibia and Angola. The next location on our trip was a 3-night stay at Serra Cafema, a camp along the Kunene River with the Serra Cafema mountain range in Angola in the distance.

Serra Cafema can only be described as the most remote luxury lodge in all of southern Africa. This was my 2nd time there, and each time I have felt like there isn't a care in the world. It is just one of those places that draws me back for more. Photographically the area is complex, and not easy to capture in one or a few images. Serra Cafema is quite a bit warmer than the Skeleton Coast Camp, and with good reason, as it is farther inland from the sea. The coastal fog and cool air doesn't reach Serra Cafema as much or as often as locations that are close to the sea. Serra Cafema is a wonderful location if you are looking to photograph the Himba tribe, as well as landscapes. On one occasion, a small group of us took out the quad bikes for a spin out on the sand dunes. This enabled us to manuever quickly into areas where we wanted to photograph, and then hop back on to go someplace else.

Serra Cafema Camp is a small, luxurious output in the middle of nowhere, yet the accommodations and common areas are extremely nice, comfortable and inviting. And the staff? Probably one of the best staff attitudes and service I have had anywhere in Africa. There are few that equal the service, like Mombo Camp and Vumbura Plains in Botswana.

Photographer on the Dunes, Serra Cafema, Namibia. Sony A900, 24-70mm, 1/40 @ f/8, ISO 100

Sundowner time! Sony A900, 70-400mm, 1/25 @ f/5, ISO 640

Back to camp after our 'tough' afternoon of photgraphy and sundowner coctails. Sony A900, 16-35mm, 1/2sec @ f/2.8, ISO 800

Photographers, dunes and mountains. Sony A900, 24-70mm, 1/250 @ f/5, ISO 100

Francois, our guide and snake charmer. Sony A900, 24-70mm, 1/80 @ f/6.3, ISO 100

Francois, JP, Larry and Randy and our quad bikes on the dunes. This is an excellent way of moving around on the dunes, as you are more nimble and can find unique areas worth stopping for where a large 4x4 vehicle likely wouldn't go. The challenge is making sure that all people in the group know when to meet back up at the quad bikes to go to the next area. Once somebody walks off behind a dune, you won't see him for a while. Sony A900, 24-70mm, 1/160 @ f/6.3, ISO 100

JP working his yoga mojo magic on the dunes. Sony A900, 24-70mm, 1/320 @ f/8, ISO 100

Setting up for refreshments after an early morning sunrise shoot. We always have snacks, cold drinks, coffee and tea ready to go after a morning shoot. Sometimes a good cup of coffee is all I need to put a smile on my face, but this is the whole package to have a cup out in a beautiful setting. Sony A900, 24-70mm, 1/320 @ f/5.6, ISO 100

On our final morning, the camp staff surprised everybody by bringing breakfast to us for a 'bush breakfast' feast. No exactly roughing it, I must say. After I took this photo, I realized that Justin has a problem with smiling for the camera. Nice one, Justin. Here is a zoomed in image for the world to see: