Namibia – Quiver Trees, Star trails & Cheetahs

As promised here is my round up of what we saw in our Namibia photo trip at the quiver tree forest near Keetmanshoop.

We stopped here for a couple of nights. To be honest I got a little tree’d-out and I think that part of the trip perhaps could have been squished into fewer days.

It did however give me a chance to try out my very first star trail picture. It was terrifying leaving my camera behind and not knowing if I’d ever see it again. Marsel gave us a little talk on how to do the star trails. You have to take a base picture before the stars come out (to get the colour of the foreground painted in). Then take photos of 5 min exposures with 1 second interval for as long as the battery lasts. Unfortunately my programmable timer remote worked a little different to the standard one and I accidently programmed it for take one 5 min exposure every 5mins and 1 second. DOH! Hence I give you the Morse code star trail below! The first is without the base image loaded (just all the star exposures stacked up in photoshop with the layer set to lighten). The send is the same but with the base layer included. I quite like them both.

The best part of this bit of the trip for me was seeing the cheetah residents being feed. There was a mother (who came over purring for a stroke) and two younger ones who both had a fondness for ripping up camera backpacks (if they could get them).

We went with a company called Squiver, run by Marsel van Oosten & Daniëlla Sibbing. The trip covers thousands of miles across Namibia so much of the time was spent travelling between amazing places, I’ll be splitting the trip report over 5 posts. This is post 1. The index page for this series is here. Up next is the amazing abandoned diamond mine at Kolmanskop…

Advertisement