A Kenyan Photo Safari

By Alastair Craig

A Kenyan Photo Safari is one mans attempt to record and share something of the excitement and experiences of spending nearly two weeks in Africa photographing wildlife and learning something of the culture and lives of the locals. The author spent more than 100 hours sitting in the back of a Toyota 4x4 truck simply observing and taking photographs of the wildlife in three separate camps within the Kenyan National Parks. This was the culmination of decades of dreaming about such a trip and two months planning it. Detailed photographs of all the wildlife you would hope to see sit alongside images of a Kenyan village school and some reflections on the distance still to travel for the youngsters there to win decent life opportunities and education. Definitely not a text book, this simply shares the journey in words and images and hopes to encourage others to do the same

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499093032

Alastair Craig

For more than 30 years Al Craig taught English and French to students aged 11-18 in several schools across the South and South East of England. His final role was as a Headteacher and included designing and seeing to completion an outstanding new secondary school for his students. With that complete, he stepped out of teaching to pursue full-time his lifelong passion for photography. Al has extensive experience of working with young people, and is happy to shoot both individuals and groups. His main passion, however, is for travel and wildlife photography. His personal photo collection covers about 50 years, although he didn't start shooting digital until 2005. Apart from the UK, his portfolio covers many areas of the USA, as well as France, China, Greece, Barbados and Kenya. His first act after leaving teaching was to take a 10 day photo safari to Kenya to capture images of many of the animals most threatened today by poachers.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Alastair Craig. 702833

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014922736

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4990-9302-5

Hardcover 978-1-4990-9301-8

Ebook 978-1-4990-9303-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 01/14/2015

Xlibris

0-800-056-3182

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

Contents

4th/5th June

6th June

7th June

8th June

9th June

10th June

11th June

12th June

13th June

14th June

15th June

Thanks!

Kit list

Clothing

Warning!!

This journey was born of a lifelong passion for photography and a fascination with travel and the exotic worlds of the old empire of my childhood.

It was also the very first item on my bucket list for when I finally left teaching after 33 years!

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Being born in England in the late 50’s meant a childhood where television was very limited, with none of the HD wildlife channels from National Geographic or 3D programmes from Sir David Attenborough to take you through the intricacies of life in the wild. By the time I was 8, Jacques Cousteau had begun his series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau – a series that was so successful that it ran from 1966-1976, with a further series of explorations running from 1976-1982. Film footage of African wildlife was the prime domain of the then un-knighted David Attenborough who filmed Elephants in Tanzania in 1965. At this stage television was black and white for the vast majority of people and consisted of only three channels. Furthermore, with no video or on-demand viewing, the documentaries, as they later became known, were wonderful times when families sat down together to be entranced by the miracles of a world of wildlife most could never afford to see in the flesh.

In 1966, like millions of others, I was thrilled by Born Free, the story of George and Joy Adamson working with Elsa the lioness in Kenya. I also watched the TV series, Daktari which, though it had nothing in reality to do with Africa, created the illusion of life in the bush.

For many children of my generation there was nothing to tempt any interest in Africa or anywhere else exotic apart from these programmes. I was fortunate to have a number of aunts – childhood friends of my mother – who had been to what were then considered wildly exotic locations such as Africa, India, Singapore and even China. Whilst I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, the chance to spend time playing with a real elephant’s foot seat, tiger skin rug and Maasai spears planted a seed that grew as slowly as an English oak, but nonetheless dug its roots deep and fed on every subsequent chance to develop.

The fascination developed further when, as a student, I came across the Maasai again through my local church, which was working with the Church Missionary Society to educate people in the UK as to the work that was going on in Kenya and Tanzania.

The fact that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a fairly regular visitor to my church, fed the interest that grew through many of the various crises that developed in Africa over the next 30 or so years.

The account that follows tries to capture something of the experience in words and pictures. The additional sections describe such things as the actual kit I used, compared to what various websites suggested I take, together with some notes on the photographic aspects of the trip based on experience in the field coupled with experience of the process of turning more than 3,000 raw digital files into the few hundred finished shots with which I was broadly happy.

4th/5th June

I flew out on Kenyan Airways KQ101 - great seat in front of the toilets! Watched Les Mis on a scratched 5in screen with leaky headphones - it could have been in black & white! I watched it again after my return - astonished to realise there were no flushing toilets in the soundtrack…

The flight to Nairobi was very fast, so we landed early then spent