We have now joined the photo tour with Squiver that we came to Namibia for, led by Ryan Dyar. Internet in Namibia is very slow, and frequently non-existant. This blog has been waiting in our queue to publish, and is actually being posted 10 days into the trip. As such, we already have quite a bit of experience with both Ryan and Squiver, and have got to say that both have been superb. Everything is meticulously planned, and when weather has interfered, backup plans were immediately put in place. We have been kept busy from before sunrise until well after sunset every day, and loved pretty much every minute of it.
I have wanted to learn how to improve my landscape and night sky photography for years, as I have never been happy with my results of those subjects. Ryan is a landscape and night sky master, which is why we specifically chose this tour. Though I still have a ways to go, Ryan has proved to be an excellent teacher, always willing to answer my barrage of questions, and to look at my images and suggest how to improve them. I think I now have a basis for moving further in this genre on my own.
We spent the first couple days photographing quiver trees. This is a tree that only grows in Southern Namibia, and is quite unique in shape, looking almost like they are upside down, with the roots reaching to the sky. There is a forest of them, scattered among a huge area declared to be a national monument of Namibia in 1995.
The area is so remote, and difficult to traverse, that we left our cameras outside overnight to capture enough sky images to build star trails. Though we worried that someone might come along and steal the cameras overnight, we were assured that it would be near impossible for anyone to find the cameras, let alone steal them. Sure enough, the next morning, I had to use a GPS program to lead me back to my camera. I would never have found it without such an aid.
The trees are scattered among an area also known as the Giant’s Playground, because of the massive boulders strewn about. Each of us wandered in different directions to find photogenic scenes, a few of which are represented above. (Note that the tree bottom-left is the same type as others, but I did some posterizing in Photoshop, to give it this magical appearance, complete with halo.)
Other scenes from the same forest. It would be easy to show dozens of interesting photos from this area, but in the interest of brevity have limited to these ten.
Just before leaving our cameras overnight, we grabbed some static star night images. The post processing of these images is quite time consuming, so I still have dozens of others waiting to be created from the raw photographs on our disks. I rather like this attempt at a silhouette of the trees, with the Milky Way above though.