“Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” - Anonymous Today is Nature Photography Day (15th June) which celebrates two of our favourite things - nature and photography! The North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) created today to honour this specialist art form and to shine the spotlight on environmental conservation and awareness. We wish you could be with us on Safari capturing the wonders and excitement of the African wilderness - but for now, you can take pictures of nature just about anywhere. Get out  - into your garden, local park or green lung and challenge yourself to find natural beauty - there’s no shortage of insects, trees, flowers and landscapes. Armand Steyn, our General Manager has some great photographic tips to help you capture the incredible wildlife and nature of Madikwe … or wherever you are.

1. Make sure that you understand and know the equipment that you are planning to use - cell phone or camera. Use time at home to practice and familiarise yourself with the settings.
2. Make sure the battery is always fully charged before each game drive and if and if possible have a second battery available. You don’t want a dreaded “battery low” message when you are about to experience a brilliant sighting of a leopard.
3. Make sure that you have enough space on the memory of the device or card and where possible have multiple storage cards - they can fail from time to time and they do get full.
4. Before you go on safari practice with your device - get to know your personal limitations and also that of your device, this will give you confidence in the field  - take out the guesswork and get the images you want.
5. Don’t try and over complicate things for yourself - stick to your strengths when in the bush so you don’t miss those crucial shots. If you want to try something new experiment on readily available subject such as impala. You can also use time back at the lodge to try some new settings.
6. If you are most comfortable using automatic setting - but you have been experimenting with other settings - remember to revert to automatic settings so that you are ready for anything that might come around the next corner. Don’t be caught short and miss the shot because you were on the wrong setting.
7. Remember digital photography gives flexibility. Take more than one photo of your subject with different composition and different levels of zoom. Editing tools mean you can easily manipulate images so make sure you have at least 3 different images of a subject.
8. If on a game drive and you see an opportunity for a photo ask your guide to stop. Remember photography is an art and no one draws or likes the same style so don’t be shy to do your art in your way.
9. Try and have an idea of what you want to do with you photographs because these days they usually end up forgotten on some hard drive and no one never looks at them again, so make sure you know what you want to do being it prints, photo books or greeting cards,
10. Last but not least remember to take the Photo.