Surely on of the highlights of every Namibia trip is a visit to Sossusvlei, a salt pan surrounded by high red dunes, located in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. The name Sossusvlei can be translated with “dead-end marsh”. Sossusvlei is the final drainage basin for the Tsauchab river, who ends here and will never see the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. To find out more about this fascinating natural marvel in the Namib desert continue after the jump… Continue reading “Namibia Explored – Sossusvlei”→
No worries – I did not get lost in the Namib desert. In fact, we successfully crossed it, arriving in the coastal town of Swakopmund today. But the last four days we had no access to the world wide web.
So I’m lagging a bit behind with my posts, but I want to stay in sequence. After visiting the Fish River Canyon I want to show you to a special place in the Namib desert, the Diamond Ghost Town of Kolmanskop. For more info and photos continue after the jump… Continue reading “Namibia Explored – Diamond Ghost Town”→
Fish River Canyon | Namibia | 2017With its breathtaking beauty the Fish River Canyon is one of Namibias prime tourist attractions. Behind only the Grand Canyon in Arizona, it is the second largest canyon in the world with a total length of about 100 miles (160 km), up to 17 miles (27 km) wide and in places almost 1800 feet (550 meters) deep. It was carved out by the Fish River about 600 Million years ago.
The Namibian night sky is spectacular. Last night at Gondwana Canyon Village I had a first try at shooting the stars. I took this image right next to the cottage we were staying in.
Camera was the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 12mm F/2 wide angle prime. I put the camera on a tripod, set the 12 second self timer (to avoid camera shake) and dialed in a 60 second exposure time at F/3.2 and ISO 400. I manually focused the lens to infinity. These are good starting points for some trial and error. For composition (as it was pitch dark in the direction I was looking) I lit the rocks with a torch while positioning the camera on the tripod, then turned off the light while taking the image. The lighting on the rocks came from the small walkway lights in my back of Gondwana Canyon Village, so I did not need to manually paint the foreground with my torch.
In lightroom I increased the white point to bring out the details in the milky way, opened the shadow up a tad, then adjusted the grad curves until I was happy with the results.
At next opportunity I will try a reduced shutter speed (like 1/30 sec) to make the stars more crisp while turning up the ISO a bit.
The “Streets of Nuremberg” continue with the road trip through Namibia. After leaving the capital Windhoek, we drove around 500 kilometers down south. First stop in the South of Namibia was Keetmanshoop with its famous Quiver Tree Forest.
This unique piece of nature comprises of about 300 trees of “Aloe dichotoma”, more commonly known as “quiver tree” or kokerboom, because bushmen traditionally used its branches to make quivers. The tallest quiver trees are two to three centuries old.
Quiver Tree | Namibia | 2017
African Sunset | Namibia | 2017
We arrived at the Quiver Tree Forest in the late afternoon, it is spectacular in the light of the fading day and to photography the tree silhouettes in front of the golden evening sky.
Tomorrow we will head to Fish River Canyon, the second largest canyon in the world only behind Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Stay tuned for more of Namibia!
26 hours after leaving home we reached Windhoek. The capital is the starting point of our tour around Namibia. After checking into our hotel we did a little stroll through the streets where I captured some scenes of local street life. Early tomorrow morning we head to Southern Namibia, less street life, more great landscapes. Stick around to discover a bit of Namibia. How frequently I can post I can’t promise, finding good Internet to upload photos seems to be often a challenge. Also please bear if I don’t reply to all your comments immediately or stay current on your blogs. I will catch up as I find time.
Africa is calling again! Tomorrow I will once again board a plane for a long distance flight. But this time it is for a family vacation. And the destination is Namibia. 23 years after our first visit we will return to this great country on the Atlantic Ocean side of Southern Africa. I’m looking forward to the immense friendliness and hospitality of the local people, colorful street life, great landscapes with oceans, canyons, mountains and deserts and the wildlife in the bush and the plains.
We are deeply in love with Africa since having lived in Johannesburg in the early nineties. Back than we have toured all of South Africa and the neighboring countries like Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. We spent our vacation two years ago in South Africa. Last year we visited Tanzania. And this year we are looking forward to see Namibia again.
The equipment I bring is my OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 40-150mm F/2.8 Pro Zoom with the 1.4 teleconverter and the PEN-F with the mZuiko 12-40mm F/2.8 Pro Zoom. Additionally my Walimex 7,5mm 1:3.5 Fisheye and the mZuiko 12mm F/2 prime lens.
So stay tuned for some insights into Southern Africa when the Streets of Nuremberg will travel the roads of Namibia.
Watchtower | South Africa | 2015
I see you | South Africa | 2015Hungry | South Africa | 2015
Frequent readers probably know by now that I try to meet the Weekly Photo Challenge from Word Press’ “The Daily Post” with one of my Street Photos. This week’s challenge has the theme “Surprise”.
While visiting Tanzania last year (a trip organized by our local church parish), on one of our tours out of Moshi (where we were based) we also visited the little town of Muikwa on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro where we took a stroll on a small path through lush vegetation and little coffee and banana farms left and right the way. And in this very remote (touristically speaking) area all of a sudden a wild and laughing group of young kids in school uniforms came downhill towards us.
Based on their “surprised” reaction I assume they never before saw or could have expected a group of foreign visitors wandering up the small path through their settlement.
Communication obviously was limited to smiles and waving hands and their curious looks in the display of my camera that got them really exited. While the little students disappeared into the settlements left and right of the path we continued a bit uphill were we eventually found their school, the Maremi Primary School. I did a post about this school early into my blogging and you can find it here.
I hope you like my interpretation of the challenge.
I wish all of you some happy, relaxed and peaceful Easter days!!
When I read the theme of this week’s Weekly Photo Challenge: Security, I immediately had this street portrait of a Tanzanian Security Guard in mind. He was protecting the entrance of a bank in Moshi, Tanzania. And he loved to pose for my camera. But while scanning over my street photo collection I also found this more subtle interpretation of the theme which I took in the old town of Marseille last year.
This week’s Weekly Photo Challenge has the theme “The Road Taken”. I enter the Safari Roads of Southern Africa. There are not many things in life that are more exhilarating than to take a 4×4 before sunrise and head out into the African Bush. The road is bumpy, but it feels more like a refreshing massage. The fresh air is full of excitement. You don’t know what animal waits for you behind the next curve, blocks the road, hides behind the bush watching you carefully. Every trip down these narrow dirt roads will have its own surprises for you. If there is something you need to put on your bucket list, it is an early morning ride on the narrow roads of the African bush veld. To see what blocked my road and hid behind the bushes, continue after the jump…..
It’s travel day again. I’ll get up at 4am to be at Nuremberg Airport for my 6:15 KLM flight to Amsterdam (remember the great Heineken bar in the Terminal?) and then onwards with Delta to Seattle where I’ll arrive at 11:24 am local time. Then its a 3 hours drive via Interstate 5 down to Portland where I’ll arrive just in time for the big Kick-Off meeting of my new project that will take me to the Pacific Northwest quite a bit over the next couple of months. It will be a 26 hour day before I get to fall in a bed again. Need to catch some sleep on the plane ! Going west helps with the Jet lag. Will try not to adapt too much to the 9hours time difference, as my flight home is already Saturday.
The photo of the Marabous I took a few minutes before sunrise in Tanzania last year with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 14-150mm F/4.0-5.6 Travel Zoom. Image specs are 1/60 sec (handheld) @ f/5.6 and ISO 200 with the zoom at the far end of its focal range. The RAW conversion was done in Lightroom CC, where I increased contrast, dynamic and clarity. I increased also sharpness a bit (you always need to do that when working on a RAW file. What is important is to mask the sharpness so you limited sharpening of pixels to the high contrast edges of the birds and the branches so you avoid over sharpening and subsequent introduction of unwanted noise in the clouds.
Yessss…I did it again 😉 Also this week’s Weekly Photo Challenge “Repurpose” I can answer with a Street Photography image. A man making shoe soles out of old car tires. If this does not qualify as being a repurpose I don’t know what else could….
I took this photo in the Streets of Moshi in Tanzania. The camera I used was my Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the mZuiko 14-150mm Travel Zoom, image details are 1/100 sec, f/5,6 @ ISO 200 and 42mm focal length (= 84mm full frame equivalent due to the m4/3 crop factor of 2).
