Did I bring the right gear to Tanzania?

I spent time researching what other photographers take on safari. I asked other photographers what they found they used the most.  I watched YouTube videos of safari trips as well as professional photographers out on safari shooting daily.  Taking all that information into consideration I wrote an article on what I was going to bring with me, and it was pretty close to what I did actually take except I left the Sigma 500mm prime at home and took a smaller camera bag.  So how did it work out you might ask...or at least I'm going to answer that question whether or not you ask.

The Canon side of the bag with Canon R5 II, 100-400mm EF L lens and the 1.4 x Teleconverter

The thought was that I would prefer to have a telephoto zoom lens on one camera and a wider lens on a second camera that should cover 90% of the focal range that I would shoot while in the safari vehicle.  I started with the 100-400mm lens on the Canon R5II and the Tamron 35-150mm on the Sony A7RV with a 14-35mm lens in the bag in case we had some chances for some landscape shots.  I also carried the 1.4 teleconverter for Canon and a DJI pocket 3 for doing some video.

On the other side of the Gura Gear Kiboko 2 16L bag we have the Sony A7R5 with the Tamron 35-150mm, the Canon 14-35 f/4, and the DJI Pocket 3.

I was not expecting to do a lot of bird photography so I left the 200-600mm lens at home.  I would love to have been able to use my 500mm primes but both were way to big to carry around with the other gear.

Since we knew we were going to be shooting pretty much exclusively from within the safari vehicle being able to quickly grab one of the two cameras and be able to point it out a window or out of the roof opening without bumping into the others in the truck was going to be important.

I can say now that I think I took the right gear.  I did put the teleconverter on the Canon for much of the trip which gave me working range from 35-150 and 140-560 which was pretty much perfect for capturing the animals.  We did see more birds than I had expected and there were times where I would have loved to have had a longer reach but for everything else the range was pretty much perfect and 560 was adequate for many of the bird shots.  Weather wise it was sunny most of the time we were out so the limitation of smaller apertures at the telephoto end didn't really hurt other than reducing the ability to have really nice separation of the subject  when there was frenetic backgrounds that might be distracting.

There are some limitations to what you can get when you have to stay in a vehicle and you are pretty much limited to shooting during the day.  We did not get a lot of time near dusk or dawn with any animals so I didn't really need to have fast lenses for lower light conditions.  It was also very hot during the day so even if I did have a longer lens shooting animals far away was never going to be useful with the heat haze and shimmering out on the Serengeti plains.

At home I will use the 35-150 for shot where the environment the animal is in is as interesting as the animal itself but most of the time you are not so close that 100mm is wide enough to capture those shots.  In Africa there are many times that animals come quite close to the vehicle, and many more times where an elephant or giraffe fill the frame even at 35mm.  There were a few times it would have been interesting to get an ultra wide shot of a couple of elephants but the challenge there would have been getting the camera out the window with a multi-tonne animals only a couple of metres away.  In any case, with the amount of dust flying around I was definitely not going to change lenses in the vehicle so I left those types of shots to the iphone wide angle lens.

Typical shooting through the canopy with the 100-400 while the 35-150 was ready for any closer shots on the bag at my feet

In general while we were driving through the parks I would have the 100-400 on a strap while standing looking through the roof of the truck with the 35-150 sitting on my camera bag at my feet.  We would usually spot an animal (or group of animals) in the distance our driver would find a good spot to see and then we would get a few shots off.  Once we were happy with that, our guide would usually find a spot where the animals were like to move towards which allowed us to get ready for closer shots and decide our compositions.  Many times the animals would cross fairly close to the truck giving us multiple angles.  With many of the cats we would just sit and watch them as they relaxed in the sun, playing, sleeping and scratching.  In these cases I would go back and forth between cameras grabbing closer individual shots and wider shots of full families.

While we were in motion I would grab the DJI pocket 3 with its gimballed camera and do a little bit of video of the scenery and as we approached some of the animals.

There was one thing I didn't use, the Sony ZV1 is a nice point and shoot video oriented camera that I will often put on the hot shoe of my cameras to get a video of what I'm shooting.  This was not practical in the safari vehicle.  That camera just sat in the camera bag the entire trip.

Everything else that was in the bag including Macbook air, plenty of extra cards and batteries, SSDs and card readers for backups and the Sony ZV1

With the other accessories, I had plenty of SD/CF express cards and only needed one SSD but I do like having more than necessary for media.  The macbook air that I purchased for the trip was fantastic.  It was very small and light but was able to quickly download everything we shot daily whether or not we had power available and was able to do processing of video and pictures just as quickly as my main computer.  I will be happy to travel with this laptop for years.

Battery wise I usually used on full battery each day and started on the second and was able to charge each night so I had enough.  I could easily last 3 full days with the Sony batteries but would have likely needed another Canon battery if we had no power available for more than 2 days.

I brought a puffer for blowing out dust and used it every night but since we didn't change lenses in the field I didn't have to clean the sensor during the trip.  I did bring a bunch of sensor cleaning kits and luckily didn't need them.  I will always bring them after finding dust on the sensor on our trip to Australia a few years back that took forever to remove via software.

I’ve learned that having a couple of these on a trip can save a lot of work removing spots afterwards.

Thanks to all the advice and research I think I had exactly the gear that I needed for the trip.  I would always like to have bigger and brighter lenses but they are impractical for plane travel and can be a pain when you are limited to shooting in tight quarters with other photographers also needing space to shoot.  I would likely not take the Sony ZV1 on a similar trip and it is likely the only change I would make if I did the same trip again.

Having 2 different brands of cameras means that I couldn't switch lenses between them if I had a problem with one of the cameras.  Usually I like to have that redundancy but at this time that is the best gear I had available and replacing the Canon gear with a Sony camera that is as useful is not in the budget especially since that would leave a number of expensive glass out of the game. I would have been just as happy using the 200-600 instead of the 100-400 since I often used it with the teleconverter anyways but at the moment I don’t have a second Sony camera that is nearly as good as the Canon R5II for resolution and speed and likely won’t in the near future.