Photography notes

I brought along two Canon XT DSLR cameras. I had 5 lenses to swap between them.

I was glad to have two cameras. I had my 7o-300mm on one and a 18-55 on the other. This made taking close ups and landscapes easy. Just switch a camera. It does get dusty but I didn't think it was excessive. The camera got dusty but I wouldn't have worried about swapping lenses. I probably wouldn't have done it very often.

I liked having my double battery grip. I only ran out of batteries once with that. I also used the other shutter release quite a bit.

I only used the big wide angle lens Joe lent to me once or twice. The landscape is so expansive that that lens was almost too much.

I used my nephew's 20-90 lens when I was walking around town. It is small but does a good job. Dropping it in the dirt once didn't hurt it (sorry Thomas).

I shot mainly in program mode. A lot of the shots are a little over exposed. I was shooting rapidly so I didn't take the time to look at the picture quality as I was shooting. I wonder if I had shot in the full automatic mode if they would have come out better?

One feature that is good on a safari is the continuous shooting mode. This is only available in the manual modes. I got some great shots of giraffes walking, zebras running out of a stream, and impalas jumping the road.

I had about 7, 2-gig memory cards. I only used 3 on the heaviest day. That was because I had my laptop and could backup each night. I copied to my hard drive, 8-gig SD cards, and 8-gig flash drives.

I had enough batteries for the cameras (7). I luckily had a few chances to charge during the trip so I was never in a bind.

I had my GPS on all the time. The batteries for GPS were the things I was running out of . I shut it off a little early a few days when the low battery warning came on. The track data will show me where we were each day. I also used it to geo-tag the pictures as I backed them up.

I only used my monopod one day. That was when I was in Ngorongoro crater. The rest of the time we were driving down the road and it would have been in the way. It worked well because I could stand on the seat and have the camera at my eye level. People who used bean bags had to bend over to rest the camera on the car edge.

Unfortunately we lost one camera. Luckily it was our point and shoot camera that I got on eBay for about $65. This was on the first day. It didn't really matter because most of my pictures were going to be taken with the DSLRs anyway. It would have been nice when we were walking around town. We think it was left on the top of the rover and fell off when we drove off.

I used Breeze Systems Downloader Pro program to copy my photos from the cards to the computer. It worked really well. It merges the GPS data as it downloads. It also makes a second copy at the same time. I had it go to my SD card. It is fast and easy. I highly recommend it.