Photo Strategies - How to Photograph each Animal Species on Your African Safari

From Africa's Big-five to the elusive-eleven animals, we will have a page dedicated to each African safari animal that you may want to encounter while on your southern African safari.



Exposure seems to be the main problem when people look at their photographs taken on safari so we will also discuss the suggested exposure compensation that should be used for each animal.

Remember that the camera sees in 'tones', not colors, and your camera meter exposes for mid-tones. Today's digital cameras have very accurate TTL (Through The Lens) meters. Nikon cameras have what they call 'Matrix' metering and Canon have 'Evaluative' metering - this means that the camera takes the whole scene's tones into consideration when making the exposure.

These metering modes are accurate for most situations but not all - for very dark subjects, like a wet buffalo, you may need to dial in Matrix metering -1 stop as the camera has let in too much light for the dark subject it saw.

Conversely for very bright subjects like a white egret, you may need to dial in Matrix metering +2 stops as the camera has not let in enough light as it saw a very bright tonal subject.

Photo Strategies for African Animals

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Aardwolf

African Wild Cat

Baboons

Buffalo

Bush Baby

Bush Buck

Bush-pig

Caracal

Cheetah

Civet

Crocodile

Eland

Elephant

Fox (Bat-eared)

Fox (Cape)

Gemsbok (Oryx)

Genet

Giraffe

Hippo

Honey Badger

Hyena (brown)

Hyena (spotted)

Impala

Impala (black-faced)

Jackal (black-backed)

Jackal (side-striped)

Klipspringer

Kudu

Leopard

Lion

Meerkat

Mongoose (Banded)

Nyala

Pangolin

Porcupine

Red Hartebeest

Reedbuck Common/Mountain

Rhino (black)

Rhino (white)

Roan

Sable

Serval

Springbok

Steenbok

Tsessebe

Vervet Monkey

Warthog

Waterbuck

Wild dogs

Wildebeest

Zebra

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