two | birdmanps

Little over a week ago I won the overall title Travel Photographer Of The Year 2015 (tpoty.com) with two black and white portfolios – a landscape portfolio and a wildlife portfolio. I’ve already posted all the winning landscape images, so here’s the first one from the wildlife portfolio.

All four images in this portfolio were shot on our Namibia Untamed tour earlier this year. We were the first company in the world to offer photo tours to Namibia, and every year we make small changes to the itinerary to stay ahead of all our copycats. Two years ago we decided to add a surprise boat cruise off the coast of Walvis Bay. This is a great opportunity to photograph thousands of seals, dolphins and pelicans. My personal highlight of this boat cruise are the pelicans – amazing creatures and very photogenic. This year we had a couple that landed on our boat and I was able to get very close with my wide angle lens. I’ve got plenty of pelicans in flight shots, so I was interested in creating something different. I decided to turn my pelican shoot into a study of shape and light, creating very graphic images.

After a while, the pelicans got so used to my presence, that I was able to move in closer and closer. So close actually, that depth of field was turning into a problem – I had to stop down quite a bit to keep everything in focus, especially with some of the other shots in this series that I will show later.

The processing was pretty straightforward, apart from the conversion to black and white. Black and white is so much more difficult than colour photography, because you don’t have those pretty colours that people like so much, and colours are helpful to separate shapes. Without colour, certain shapes that were separated from each other in the colour version, will suddenly merge in a black and white version. Good black and white images are therefore often created on location – that’s when you can already see what is needed for a good bw image.

If you would like to join us to Namibia, then you’re out of luck for 2016 as we’re fully booked. Even our 2017 tour is already fully booked, but we opened a second tour for 2017 that is going to be led by amazing landscape photographer Ryan Dyar. It will take place from 17 June to 1 July 2017.

If you want to visit Namibia, look no further. There is no better organised Namibia tour out there. Also, we are still the only one that offers microlight flights over the famous Namibian sand dunes.

If you’re interested in joining Ryan to Namibia, please check out our website for more information, images, video clips, and a very detailed tour PDF: http://www.squiver.com

Marsel

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