“What’s in your camera bag?” is a question I am frequently asked and one that always gets the same response – “It depends where I’m going.”
Just ‘cos you’ve got lots of lenses doesn’t mean you have to take them all.
If at all possible, try to take a combination that means you won’t need to constantly be changing lenses. Dust is a massive problem in Africa and every time you change lenses you are opening up both camera and lens to a potential dust invasion.
Community Owned Community Operated Nature (COCOON Conservancy) Conservancies are critical rewilding initiatives undertaken outside India’s Protective Area Network. Based on the underlying premise that communities living closest to our most biodiverse wonderlands deserve to be the primary beneficiaries and custodians of our biodiversity this initiative expands the size and improves the quality of habitat available to wildlife by encouraging local communities to convert their own marginal and failed farms back to their natural wild state.
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Amazingly, the weather held for the whole day and our afternoon drive also enjoyed decent weather. The sky was blue and the air was wonderfully clear.
I would have loved to go back and sit near the Broadbill nests but I did not have the only vote and my travelling companions wanted to get out of the jungle onto the plains where they could see some of the larger mammals.
Kaziranga is a lovely park to visit with plenty of water bodies and lots of open plains making it easy to see the wildlife.
In fact, I saw more mammals on my first drive in Kaziranga than I’d seen in a week at Tadoba, and a large percentage of them were One-horned Rhinos. The park has almost 2,700 rhinos, almost twice as many rhinos as Swamp Deer (1,800) Elephants were plentiful too, as were the Water Buffalo.
The Sundarbans is an area that has long appealed to me and finally I was getting the chance to visit. Touted as the National Park with the highest number of tigers in India it is also listed among India’ top birding locations, so I had high hopes. The drive from Kolkata to Godkhali where we’d be boarding a boat to[…]
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Probably one of the most frequent questions we get asked by clients is “What lenses should I take on safari?”
This question is not limited to first timers either; because the equipment you need to take depends very much on where you are going and what the conditions will be like. Photographing rhinos on the plains of Kaziranga NP requires a different approach to photographing sloth bears in the forest at dusk, and photographing birds is very different to photographing elephants.
So how do you make the right selection?
Sunderbans Biosphere Reserve, Manas National Park, Gorumara National Park, Singalila National Park, Glenburn Tea Estate India has 50 Tiger reserves, governed by Project Tiger which is, in turn, administrated by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and 104 National Parks. Some of these reserves and National Parks are World renowned; places like Kanha, Ranthambhore and Corbett. Unsurprisingly, these famous reserves[…]
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This is not the happiest of times; thanks to Covid-19 we’re grounded and all short term travel plans have had to be cancelled.Worse still, just about the only calls we’re getting from clients are to rearrange (or even cancel) trips that are already booked, not to book new ones. Of course we understand the situation and we’re doing all we[…]
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Ranthambore National Park is one of the biggest and most renowned national parks in Northern India, covering 282 km². Ranthambhore was established as the Sawai Madhopur Game Sanctuary in 1955 by the Government of India and was declared one of the Project Tiger reserves in 1973. Ranthambhore became a national park on 1 November 1980. In 1984, the adjacent forests were declared the Sawai Man Singh Sanctuary and Keladevi[…]
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It’s hard to believe, as you negotiate the hurly burly of Agra’s traffic, that less than 2 hours away is a place that offers clean air and serenity. Yet that is exactly what you’ll find at Mela Kothi. Nestling amidst acres of woodland and pasture, the Mela Kothi was built in the 1890’s and was ideally located to serve as[…]
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