Photography on safari in Tanzania, what the light and the rules allow
The gate opens at 6:15 and it is still almost dark. The sun comes up around half an hour later, and the light you came for lasts about twenty minutes after that.
That is the thing nobody tells you before a first safari. The light here is short, it is hard, and it arrives at nearly the same time every day of the year. Everything else on this page follows from that.
No, you do not need a permit
It is the question we are asked most, almost always by someone travelling with a long telephoto lens who has read something worrying. The answer is no.
There is no photography permit for tourists in Tanzania, whatever the size of your lens. The lists you will find saying that a tripod or a second body makes you a professional come from travel agencies, not from any authority. No official document anywhere sets a limit in millimetres or counts your cameras.
Where the line falls is purpose. Commercial work, meaning commissioned, for publication or for sale, needs a permit from the Tanzania Film Board, which costs USD 1,000 plus a daily fee per person in each park. It cannot be arranged at the gate or after you arrive, so if that is what you are coming for, it starts months earlier.
There is one grey area and we would rather name it than pretend it does not exist. Selling a holiday photograph to a stock agency afterwards is not covered by any document we can find. If you already know before you travel that the photographs are for sale, you are formally on the commercial side of that line.
The light, and why it works differently here
If you are used to summer light in Europe or North America, your instincts about when to shoot will be wrong here. At home the sun comes up hours later in December than it does in June. In the central Serengeti it does not. Sunrise falls between about 6:15 and 6:50 all year, and sunset between about 6:30 and 7:00 in the evening. The whole annual swing is smaller than one of your clock changes.
Day length varies by sixteen minutes across the entire year.
And the soft light before sunrise and after sunset lasts about twenty-one minutes. Not the generous hour you get at higher latitudes in midsummer. Twenty-one minutes, and then the light goes hard.
Which is the real reason for the early starts. Not because guides enjoy them, and not to beat anybody to a sighting. If you leave camp at eight you have already missed half of the day’s usable light.
Between about 9:30 in the morning and 3:30 in the afternoon the sun is high, the contrast is brutal, the shadows are short and your highlights blow out. Around March and again in late September the sun stands almost directly overhead at midday and the animals cast almost no shadow at all. Those are the hours for shade, for small subjects close to the vehicle, or for sleeping, and the last of those is not a joke.
You are in a vehicle, and that decides everything
In the national parks you stay in the car and may only get out at marked places. That rule is the reason you can get as close to the animals as you do, so it is worth being glad about rather than frustrated by.
It does shape every photograph you take. All of it is workable.
You shoot through the roof hatch or an open side window, which leaves you a handful of positions and no way to choose your height. A tripod is useless in a car. A bean bag resting on the roof edge or the window frame is not, and it costs almost nothing and weighs almost nothing. Plenty of people bring an empty one and fill it with rice or beans when they arrive.
The engine often stays running when the car stops, and you will feel that through a long lens before you see it in the file. Ask your guide to switch it off while you shoot. He will, every time, and it matters most in the first hour of the day when your shutter speed is already marginal.
You are also not alone. In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area no more than five vehicles may stand at a sighting, a quiet rule applies, and vehicles must keep at least 25 metres, around 80 feet, from the animals. Those are the official rules, not a guide being cautious, and they are why he will sometimes drive away from something you wanted to stay with.
One expectation to put down before you travel. The open-sided vehicles you see in safari photography are not standard in Tanzania. The parks charge 50 percent extra for an open vehicle, so almost everyone, us included, drives a closed Land Cruiser with a roof that pops up. It works better than it sounds. You have shade all day, and you stand up through the roof to shoot with the metal of the car steadying you.
What to bring
A telephoto reaching 400 mm covers almost everything you will want. A 100 to 400 or a 200 to 500 zoom is plenty. You can go longer, and people do, but a very long lens is harder to hold still in a car and you lose more to camera shake than you gain in reach.
Do not leave the wide angle at home. The landscape is half of what you came for, and a small elephant in an enormous plain often says more than a frame filled with elephant.
Two bodies with a lens on each beat one body and a bag of lenses, because every lens change in a vehicle is an invitation to the dust. If you only have one body, decide in the morning which lens is staying on it.
Bring more cards and more batteries than you think you need. Most camps let you charge, but not always in your own tent, and sometimes only in the dining tent for a few hours. Tanzania runs on 230 volts with the British three-pin plug, type G, so you need an adapter. Nearly every camera and laptop charger is rated 100 to 240 volts and will be fine, but read the small print on yours before you assume it, particularly if you are coming from the United States or Canada.
And one thing people get wrong. The compulsory insurance you take out on arrival in Tanzania publishes no baggage limit, so do not treat it as cover for your equipment. Insure the gear separately, at home, before you leave.
Dust
It gets into everything. That sounds like the sort of thing every safari page says, and then you open your bag after three days in the Serengeti and find it in the thread of the lens cap.
Change lenses as little as you can get away with. When you must, turn your back to the wind and point the camera body downwards while you do it. Clean with a microfibre cloth that lives in a sealed pocket, not with your shirt, because your shirt is carrying the same dust the lens is.
One widely repeated tip does not work here. Putting the camera in a plastic bag is not an option, because plastic carrier bags are not allowed in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Bring a fabric cover or a proper camera bag instead.
Photographing people
This is where most travellers get it wrong, and it is the part almost no safari page covers at all.
In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, photographing local people is prohibited except at the designated Cultural Bomas. That is in the conservation authority’s own visitor rules. So a camera pointed at a Maasai from the side of the road is not just bad manners there, it is against the rules.
Everywhere else, ask first. It takes a sentence, your guide will translate it, and a photograph of somebody who knows you are taking it is almost always the better picture than the one taken through a window from a moving car.
We should be honest about the Boma visits too, because they have a reputation. The official entrance fee for a Cultural Boma in Ngorongoro is USD 20 per vehicle. In practice villages and guides add to it, and travellers report regularly that the price on arrival is higher than the one agreed, with pressure to buy souvenirs afterwards.
We arrange these visits in advance, directly with the community, and the price is settled before you get there so you know what it is and where it goes. That is not a moral point, it is a practical one. Photography is relaxed when the arrangement is already made, and tense when it is being negotiated in front of you.
Two more places to put the camera down, and these are not negotiable anywhere in the country. Military buildings, airports, bridges and government buildings may not be photographed. Phones have been confiscated for less.
Drones
Leave it at home.
Drones are banned in the national parks as a starting point. An exemption exists, and it requires four separate permits issued in a fixed order, by the Film Board, then the Ministry of Defence, then the civil aviation authority, then the park authority. It takes weeks and costs more than USD 1,000.
And here is the part that settles it. Even holding all four permits, you may not fly during the migration river crossings in the Serengeti. The single shot that most people are carrying a drone for is the one that is specifically excluded.
People try anyway. They lose the drone and they pay a fine, and we have watched it happen at a gate.
What your guide does for your photographs
This is the part people underestimate, and it is worth more than anything in your bag.
A guide who knows you are photographing parks the car differently. Not as close as physically possible, which is what most people think they want, but so the light is coming from behind you, so you are not shooting into the sun, and so the animal is moving towards you rather than away. He will angle the vehicle so your side is the good side, and he will turn the engine off without being asked twice.
He also knows when to wait. A leopard in a tree can do nothing for an hour and then stretch, and the people who drove off after ten minutes are the ones who did not get it. Ngomi is a zoologist, and what he is reading while you are waiting is whether the animal is about to do something.
So tell your guide on the first morning. That you are photographing, which side of the car you would rather shoot from, and that you would sooner spend an hour with one animal than tick off six. A good guide will rebuild the whole day around that, and it will do more for your photographs than any lens you can buy.
Two more things
The balloon flight. You can take your camera and a small bag, and everything has to be stowed for take-off and landing. You are standing in a basket compartment with two to four other people, so a long heavy lens is awkward and in the way. A mid-range lens serves you better up there, because the landscape is the reason you went up in the first place.
The walking safari. You walk at the ranger’s pace and you do not set up a tripod without asking him first. One camera, one lens, and watch where the light is coming from. Walking is also the one part of a safari where the best thing you can do with your hands is nothing.
Your guide is the most important piece of kit you have
You can bring the best glass money can buy and still come home with ordinary photographs, because you were in the wrong place at the wrong hour. And a mid-range camera in the right place, at the right minute, with somebody who knew to wait, produces the frames you still have on the wall years later.
That is the whole reason we only run private trips. Nobody else in the vehicle is waiting for you to finish, and how long you stay with that leopard is your decision and nobody else’s.
How long you stay is your decision
Every trip we run is private, so nobody else in the vehicle is waiting for you to finish with that leopard.