On this site you will find information about most of the major wildlife reserves in Southern Africa. I've tried to include useful information for people who are planning a trip to Africa, and for photographers. On this website you'll find lots of information and pictures from South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Parks covered on this website include the Kruger National Park, Hluhluwe - Imfolozi, Addo Elephant NP, Mountain Zebra NP, Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, West-Coast National Park, Sabi Sands Game Reserve, Timbavati Game Reserve, Sossusvlei, Victoria Falls, Nxai Pan NP, Savuti, Chobe, Moremi, Linyanti, the Okavango Delta, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and Etosha.
SANParks Photographic Awards 2010
Every year SANParks organises a photographic competition for amateur and professional photographers. The competition is divided in eleven categories for DSLR and compact cameras. Images entered in this competition must be made in parks managed by SANParks. I entered a couple of images this year and reached the final selection of the DSLR - Animals and Insects category with an image of a Black-backed Jackal which I took during a trip to Mountain Zebra National Park in April 2009.
Today I received word that my image is the winner in its category.
Africa Photographic Awards 2010
I made it into the final of the Wildlife Behaviour category with a black & white image of elephants but I unfortunately didn't win anything. Making it into the final selection of the biggest photographic competition is an honour in itself so I'm not complaining.
Kruger National Park - May 2010
In May I was in the Kruger National Park for a quick five day visit. The bush was very lush due to good rains in the first months of the year which made spotting wildlife difficult. The grass was also high in most places which made wildlife photography difficult. Usually it makes sense to stake out a waterhole but due to the good rains there was a lot of water available in the bush which meant that this strategy wasn't an option. This meant that I had to depend on the strategy of driving a lot to 'bump' sightings. I managed to find cheetah, lion and leopard during my stay so in the end the 'driving'strategy was a very successful one. In the south of the park there were a fair number of elephants around but I didn't see a lot of them in the middle of the park. White rhino's seemed to be everywhere, I saw more then thirty during my stay.
One of my favourite places in Kruger for bird photography is Biyamiti Weir on the S114. It didn't disappoint this time, I got some good bird and water monitor images there. I cannot recommend Biyamiti Weir highly enough to photographers. Make sure to get there early in the morning so the sun is in your back and bring lots of memory cards ;)
Another thing on my list to do this time was to photograph the honey badgers which raid the trash bins at Satara camp each night. I failed the first two nights but the third night I was able to get some nice shots of two honey badgers. See the pictures from this trip in the photo galleries or click this link.
Website facelift - March 2010
If you're a regular visitor to the site then you'll have noticed that the site has had a facelift. After four years I decided to completely redesign the look and feel and navigation of the site as the old look and feel was outdated. While I was redesigning the website I found a lot of information which was either outdated or incomple so I also updated a lot of information. The most important changes to the website are the following:
- The new site has been optimised for 1024x768 resolution as 99% of the visitors to this site used this resolution or a higher one. My apologies to the other 1%
- I've redone most of the image galleries which means that most images are now either 900 x 600 pixels wide for landscape images and 533 x 800 for portrait images
- New image galleries have been added
- In all of the galleries I've added descriptions for the images and because of popular request I've included the scientific names of animals in most galleries
- The maps of Afica section has been completely redesigned and lots of maps have been added
- A lot of GPS waypoints for the various parks have been added
- Various articles have been updated
- Search functionality has been upgraded
- Image gallery functionality has been upgraded
- RSS feeds have been implemented
- SEF URL's have been implemented
Unfortunately some of the content from the old website has not made it to the new website:
- I've unfortunately been unable to migrate the registered users from the old website to the new one so if you had registered on the old website then please do so again on the new website
- The analogue photography category has not been migrated to the new website as most people no use digital cameras
- The panoramic images feature has not been implemented on the new website as I'm struggling to find a panorama images component which works to my satisfaction.
One of the biggest drawbacks of the new website is that is uses a new system for generation the URL's. The URL's from the old website are incompatible with the new website which means that external links to my website don't work anymore. I've implemented redirects from the old URL to the new URL for the most popular articles, but I'm sure that some external references to my website don't work anymore. Should you feel that I should add a specific redirect from an old URL to the new one please let me know.
I think the new look and feel and updated contents of the website is a huge improvement over the old website and I hope regular visitors feel the same. Use the poll on the lefthand side of the screen to supply me with feedback about the new look and feel.
Images on this web-site
All images on this site are my property, please treat them as such. No form of reproduction is authorized without written authorization. I'm very serious in protecting my images from piracy so please respect my copyright and don't steal my images. Should you want to use pictures from this website for commercial or non-commercial purposes then please contact me.