Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
I had never worked as a photographer before, so imagine my surprise when I got an email inviting me to travel to a remote sub-Saharan portion of Africa to document the local wildlife. I'm not the kind of guy who turns down an invitation like that so I took my entry level Tsetse camera and set off. First, my partner and I met up with James, our local tour guide, and pitched a forward operating base in a wide open steppe called Duma Steppe. We brought a beat-up old Suzuki Jimny to get around the rugged terrain. And that was the beginning of a three-month long Safari adventure! (Three months? It didn't feel that long to me. Felt more like 25 hours, give or take, to 100% completion)
For the first few days, James drove me around to some of the landmarks of Duma (Swahili for "cheetah") Steppe. I wasn't used to driving the Suzuki and was still getting practice with my camera. Since my camera was kind of crummy we didn't do anything fancy. I did get this great shot of a hippo yawning:
Probably the highlight of the early days was going out with James and watching a cheetah take down a gazelle. He drove while I took pictures. Nature can be pretty violent, but it's all part of the circle of life.
All the photos I sent back to my employer were graded on angle, distance from subject, clarity of subject, and photographic technique. When I submitted great photos, I got paid handsomely, but when I submitted terrible photos, they really stiffed me. Along with my main job photographing and documenting all the local wildlife, I took some contract jobs on the side so I could afford new camera equipment, not to mention better coats of paint for the Suzuki! For one of those side jobs, I had to climb a tree to get a close-up shot of a giraffe eating:
As time went on, we moved into other areas. Kiboko (Swahili for "Hippopotamus") Swamp had a lot of bird life, marshy vegetation, and lots of interesting trees. I watched a herd of elephants cross the swamp. Here's a Mama elephant helping a baby up onto a muddy island:
All work and no play wouldn't be any fun, so sometimes I goofed off a little. Can you believe that they have trees big enough to fit in? These trees are called Baobabs.
From there we went on to Choroa (Swahili for "Oryx") Gorge, a sort of desert area home to meerkats who are super shy, I had to use my remote trap camera to get a good picture. There were also ostriches and here I've included a photo of their goofy mating dance which as you can see didn't work on the female they were trying to woo. I also caught a brief glimpse of the rare king cheetah on top of a mountain.
The highlight of Choroa Gorge was definitely Polepole (Swahili for "gentle") falls, home to some fiercely protective elephants. One of them gored me, but I just woke up at base camp safe and sound... strangely the pictures I had taken that day were erased off my memory card. A magazine paid me to take pictures of my whip in front of the falls -- check out my sweet zebra paint.
We went to Lake Heroe (Swahili for "flamingo"), which featured a huge mountain we could hike up called Mount Hakunamatata (Swahili for "no problem"). On the mountain I managed to find a Rainbow Agama, which was gorgeous. The Lake was home to an enormous population of Flamingos. Behind the lake I found a shaded area that was home to Baboons (by far the worst, most angry animal I encountered on my journeys).
There was also a leopard, who was not afraid to hunt. He made short work of an antelope, can you believe the leopard actually drags its dead prey up into the trees it sits in?
James took me out to Kiwanja (Swahili for "field") Plain, a wide open grasslands that featured a number of rocks called Kopjes (Dutch or Afrikaans for "little head"). One, called Simba Kopje was an awesome climb. Side-note: Simba is just swahili for Lion. How lazy are Disney, am I right? I saw lions, reticulated giraffes, a herd of wildebeests, and an African crocodile which was so dangerous I had to use a remote controlled car with a mounted camera to get close.
This one got me a cover of National Geographic, so I'm pretty proud of it:
The Wildebeest herd crossing a river:
I couldn't resist grabbing a shot of myself near Simba Kopje:
I also met a boy from the local Maasai tribe. He mostly spoke Swahili but was able to help me find some of the animals I was looking for. He didn't feel like a fake or Hollywood patronizing depiction of an African tribesman, it felt like the developers did research in order to get this portrayal right. I got this close-up shot for a magazine special on Maasai tribes.
Looking back on it all, the highlights of my Safari were definitely some of the riskiest contract jobs I took. To name a few, trying to get a picture of a Zebra rearing back for National Geographic's "Another side of Herbivores" issue; watching two giraffes "neck", which is a kind of fighting where they whip their necks at each other; using a gun mic to record elephant trumpeting without getting gored to death; retrieving a crittercam a previous team left on a lioness; being chased by an elephant when I got too close; watching a lion take down a zebra. Probably the single scariest moment was when a cheetah actually jumped up on our Suzuki while I was hiding in the bushes trying to get a shot.
Nature is so interesting. One thing that I learned was that sometimes there's strength in numbers. I watched hyenas steal a dead antelope from a cheetah and baboons chase out a leopard. Even when a lion attacks a zebra, it uses other lions to divert one zebra from the herd to be able to pick it off more easily. It doesn't always work though, as a croc easily pulled a wildebeest out of the herd.
Sometimes we safaried at night to get some rare nocturnal specimens. I never quite mastered night-time photography, I couldn't get the exposure settings right and the shutter speed was so slow. Also, my headlamp scared the animals away quite a lot:
Near the end of our safari we found a series of large animal tracks. We then found evidence that something enormous was eating some of the buffalo. We wondered if it might have been an undiscovered species. We also found this old indigenous drawing that suggested a mighty creature was once present in the area. We spent a lot of time wondering what it could be.
On my last day, James took me out to Kiwanja Plain for a hot air balloon ride. It was an amazing experience. I brought my telephoto zoom lens. I should since I've just say that started getting paid I've only bought Sony Alpha products, which I whole-heartedly recommend! These are taken mostly from a 300mm f/2.8 G SSM II fixed zoom lens on a Sony Alpha 700 body.
As we drifted over Simba Kopje, we finally caught sight what was behind the tracks and the dead buffalo... an enormous Barbary Lion, thought extinct in the wild for a hundred years. Its roar was powerful. I couldn't get the best shot, so I'm not sure if my colleagues will believe me, but I know myself that what I saw was a Barbary Lion, and it's the only explanation.
Being a part of this safari was a real pleasure. It was rewarding seeing my photos next to real National Geographic photos and video, seeing my shots on magazine covers, learning about species that I photographed, watching all of the animals hilarious idiosyncrasies. It wasn't perfect: there were some crummy ground textures, the incredibly long amount of time it took to permanently save all of my photos and progress into my journal every few days, and awkward controls (especially that Suzuki, hoo boy that thing handles badly). Also, I think to really love the game, you need the patience to accept the fact that waiting in hiding for the perfect moment to take the perfect photo might take a while. I loved it. The game also comes with tons of HD video and pictures from National Geographic's archives, as well as a 3d model viewer and a soundtrack replay option.
Your mileage may vary, as it is a bit of a clunky mess and how well you tolerate that is going to vary depending on the kind of player you are. I'll also add that almost no American outlets reviewed this game. IGN's review (3.5/10) shows literally no evidence of having playing the game for more than an hour. The "guided tour" lasts maybe 30 minutes of a 25 hour game; camera upgrades make the shutter speed faster by putting aperture, exposure, and shutter speed under your control; James doesn't disappear; you don't just do one specific quest at a time; you get the hang of the jeep; most animals do lots of different things depending on context; only about half the big-game photo ops tell you your best photo. Every example provided and every animal mentioned in the review happens in the first hour of the game. Also, just subjectively, the orchestral score is really gorgeous and is part of Video Games Live's rotation--IGN gave the sound category a 3.5/10 because the in-game dialogue between humans doesn't have voice acting. So, yeah, great job IGN.
PlayStation Lifestyle's review is worse as it literally gave up in the first 30 minutes, since they claim that the game forces you only to go to the area where your active mission takes place, and that's something that's only true for the first 5 or so missions out of 120+ (thus when they complain about the camera controls, they're also complaining about only the first of several cameras, which doesn't have exposure or shutter control). It's quite possible they wrote their final review out of a brief hands-on before the game's release. Do I think reviewers need to finish every game they don't like? No. But do I think reviewers need to play more than an hour so that they don't accidentally write a review where literally everything they say is solved in-game after they gave up? Yes. 1up's review at least suggested they got pretty far in the game, so for that they deserve credit.
If you're the kind of person who is looking for a different experience than just touring through a warzone as ultra-nukes detonate the Space Empire State Building around you and you wait for your colleagues to breach a door so you can slow-mo kill the Communist Super-Terrorists inside with a sick headshot blasts from your M4, I really recommend an African safari with Afrika on PS3.
