10 days wildlife photography expedition to the best locations of Namibia

GUIDED NAMIBIA PHOTO TOUR – WILD NAMIBIA

Discover Namibia’s natural beauty and let us help you capture unforgettable memories. Our professional photo guide will accompany you on your journey and show you the best spots to capture that perfect shot.

Namibia Photographic Tour Wild Namibia
After many trips to every corner of Namibia Paolo gained a deep knowledge of the country. This allowed us to design a tour that will make the most of your time there, ensuring that you will always be in the right place at the right time. Plus, we will have access to locations at times that are usually closed to normal tourists, giving you the chance to take unique photos at the best time of the day.

We aim to take you to beautiful locations and give you every opportunity to get great images while improving your technique throughout the workshop. We limit the number of participants in our workshop to just six which gives us plenty of time with everyone in the field, meaning Paolo will be close at hand to provide you with any advice or help you need, from lens choice to composition and camera settings. From day 1 Paolo will assess your photographic level and what you’d like to focus on, then tailor the sessions accordingly.

We selected the dates of our workshop to ensure we are in each location at the best time of year. The trip takes place at the peak of the dry season when water is very scarce and wildlife activity tends to gather around waterholes, increasing a lot our chances of amazing sightings.

Highlights

Detailed Itinerary

Guided Namibia Photo Tour – Wild Namibia

Your photo guide and driver will be waiting for you at the international airport near Windhoek.

After meeting at Hosea Kutako International Airport and a brief stop in a mall in Windhoek, where you have the chance to buy everything you might need for the trip, we start the drive north towards our first destination, a small lodge in the wild Damaraland. We will reach our destination in time to check in at our lodge and to go out for a first game drive.

We will have an open safari vehicle where each guest will have a “window seat” to make sure everyone can make the most out of the situation. Our private safari guides will follow a dry riverbed tracking desert elephants; if we are lucky we might even see desert lions and black rhinos.

Price

What is included?

What is excluded?

In search of elusive animals.

The animals living in these dry lands cover great distances to find water and food. Our day will start early, a cup of coffee and we are out for a first game drive where our guides will follow the tracks in search of these elusive animals. Back at the lodge in late morning for breakfast, we will have some time to rest before going out again on our second safari of the day, that will end after dark. Dinner at the lodge.

Etosha National Park, one of the largest parks in the whole of Africa.

After a last game drive around the lodge it’s time to hit the road for our next destination, Etosha National Park, one of the largest parks in the whole of Africa. The transfer will be around 4 hours to the gate of the park – Namibia is a really big country! After registering at the gate we will keep driving for about 75km to reach our destination, in the heart of the Etosha.

With a surface almost as big as Switzerland, the Etosha is home to a wide range of mammals and birds. While this is still wild nature and not a zoo, it’s almost guaranteed to see large herds of antelopes, elephants, rhinos and lions, and with a bit of luck we might even see leopards and cheetahs. The dry season is at its peak and as the water becomes more and more scarce in the bush, animals are coming to the waterholes to drink. That’s where we are going to find them, targeting some of the best waterholes where rhinos, elephants and lions usually come to drink.

After checking in to our accommodation for the next 3 nights we head out with our 4×4 to check some selected waterholes where predator activity tends to be higher. Once back at our camp, we will have 24-hour walking access to an artificially lit waterhole, where we can see animals during the night hours when they are most active. Expect giraffes, elephants, rhinos and lions to be here between sunset and sunrise. The scenes here are so good that the waterhole appears for a long chapter in the “Night on Earth” series by Netflix!

Explore the waterholes looking for predators coming out of the Etosha pan.

We spend two whole days in the park, heading out well before sunrise on our private game drive. Early morning and late afternoon are the moments when most animals are more active so we will try to spot some wildlife while it is still dark so that we are ready to take our photos when the first light will arrive.

After the drive, we go back to our camp for breakfast and we go take a look at the waterhole; the central hours of the day are usually the ones with less wildlife activity, but sometimes animals show up even at midday!

In the afternoon we will have some time for a photography review and Q&A before heading out on another safari session where we will explore the surrounding waterholes looking for predators coming out of the Etosha pan.

Premium access to wildlife.

Today we move again. After our usual early morning game drive (and a good breakfast) we pack our car and we drive about 80km to the eastern border of the park. We will see the landscape change, with less vegetation and more wide, open plains. We will check-in in a private reserve bordering the main park, where for the next 3 days we will have a premium access to wildlife. After taking place in our rooms we are ready to head out for a game drive inside the reserve, where our guide will have permits to drive off road, positioning the vehicle to give us the best angle for photography.

Photograph the animals from ground level.

We spend the next two days rotating between game drives in the private reserve, game drives in the main park and sessions at a private photography hide where we will have the chance to photograph the animals from ground level.

We will also have plenty of time for a photography reviews and Q&A between the safari sessions.

Very high leopard population density.

After our last game drive we leave Etosha and we start heading back south. We have a final stop before heading back to Windhoek: we will spend the night on a reserve known to have a very high leopard population density. We will go out on a game drive looking specifically for these elusive predators; while it’s still possible that we cannot find any (it’s still wild nature), the chances here are as high as they can get. Here you can also expect to see a wide variety of smaller mammals that are usually more difficult to spot in the Etosha: jackals, bat-eared foxes, duikers, dik-dik, steenbok, as well as lot of orix, kudu, zebra and springbok. If we are very lucky we might even find some white rhinos!

We will stay out until dark before having dinner at the lodge.

Looking for rhinos, or track leopards.

For our final game drive of the trip we will choose: we can track leopards once again or we can go looking for rhinos, with our guides leading us quite close to these giants.

We will then drive back to WDH, reaching the airport by 2PM. If this is too late for your flight, we will be happy to host a farewell dinner at the famous Joe’s Beerhouse in Windhoek. We will be happy to assist with accommodation for the night and with an airport transfer the next day (dinner and accommodation are not included and come at an extra cost).

While the focus is on wildlife, you will also have plenty of opportunities to capture stunning landscape views, so you will want to cover a wide range of focal lengths, ideally from 16mm to 400mm. You will need a dSLR or mirrorless camera with interchangeable lenses. The best option for this type of photography is one of the latest mirrorless systems with advanced autofocus, but if you already have a dSLR system you should be good to go.

Wildlife

Wildlife is the primary focus of this trip; in addition to the iconic orix we will see plenty of spingboks, mountain and plains zebra, various species of antelopes, brown and spotted hyenas, wildebeest, ostriches, jackals, giraffes, black and white rhinos, elephants and big predators like lions, cheetah and leopards. These encounters will happen in the wild and we will be shooting from an open safari vehicle, with sometime limited possibilities to change our position relatively to the subject. As main lens for these situations we recommend a zoom in the 100-400 or 200-600 mm. If you also have a prime telephoto (400mm f2.8 to 600mm f4) we highly recommend that you bring it along.

If you want to rent a telephoto lens for the trip do not hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to assist you with our on-site rental partners.

Landscapes

During the trip we will also have plenty of opportunities to photograph wider landscapes; for this a wide angle zoom in the 16-35mm range, or alternatively a 20-70mm lens, will be perfect.

Batteries & Memory cards

We will have regular access to electric power; however we recommend to bring enough batteries and memories for at least a full day of shooting – that might be several thousands of images per day, depending on the situations.

Laptop to review and edit images

Together with your laptop we highly advise at least one external small hard drive for storage and backup of your photos. Post processing workflow, backup and storage strategies will be discussed by Paolo during the trip.