Kruger National Park, South Africa.

On our October photo safari, Dries provided a professional photographer to accompany us and advise us on capturing the best opportunities for our photo keepsakes as part of our photo safari arrangement. Hannes Rossouw was also available via WhatsApp for pre-safari information. I wasn’t shy in asking his advice on purchasing a suitable lens; his recommendation, the Nikkor 200-500 mm f/5.6 lens, worked well. I even saved some money by buying a used lens at a local camera store.

But I digress from the point of this story. During the last days of our stay at Skukuza, I expressed some interest in night photography. Hannes scheduled some time for me to show me some of the principles of the genre. As a last-minute impulse buy before heading to South Africa, I bought a Nikon Z7 II with a Nikkor 24-120 mm f/4 lens. Being entirely unfamiliar with the new mirrorless camera, I was unsure of its menu structure, even though it looked similar to my Nikon D500. Hannes worked through the menus to help me set up the camera for night photography, even though he didn’t have a mirrorless Nikon either. He knew what settings to look for, and we mounted the camera on a tripod and stepped outside to set up a composition.

Night photography with an f/4 lens isn’t ideal, but we compensated for its lack of light gathering by using longer exposures. During the 15-second or longer exposures, Hannes took a flashlight to illuminate the trees for a few seconds, allowing them to be interesting foreground objects against the night sky. The Kruger Shalati hotel train provided its own lighting in the distance. We took several shots while finding a nice mix of exposure and external light experiments, and I waited until I was back in Fargo to evaluate the results of our efforts. I selected one of the experimental shots taken at f/5.6, 30 seconds, 24 mm, and ISO 3200. Adobe Lightroom Classic’s Denoise function helped reduce the noise. I used a small brush mask to minimize the exposure of the Kruger Shalati train lights and cropped the image to remove the fenceposts.

An early departure for our morning game drive was in the offing, so we called it a night. The next evening, we went to the reception center in the park to take advantage of some interesting foregrounds to accompany our night sky.

The reception areas were too bright to work well with star fields, but I thought the images turned out nicely, given that the bright lights on the building created so much light pollution. Instead of opening the lens wide, we stopped it down to generate starburst fields around the lights. Hannes then used a flashlight to expose the sculpture of the Kruger Park Founders. The final image I selected from our trials was shot at f/18, 24 mm, 15 seconds, and ISO 400.

I processed the photo using Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop. I used Photoshop’s generative fill tool to remove the two parked cars in the foreground and remove the handicapped parking sign that intruded on the right edge of the sculpture.

The Impala Sculpture is a beautiful artwork, and it was so well lit from the available light that the best exposure was when we didn’t apply flashlight illumination. I processed the best exposure setting, which was set at f/18, 24 mm, 15 seconds, and ISO 6400. The original image had two bright lights, one in the parking area to the left and one on the building to the right.

I chose two possible crops: a square that included the light on the left and a vertical format that eliminated both bright lights.

The file was processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic, starting with the Denoise tool. A large, bright red “No Entry” sign with a white bar is beside the light on the left. I used Lightroom’s removal tool to remove it. I then cropped the image to create the two views, a square crop, and a vertical crop. Feel free to comment on the format you like best.

A big thanks to Hannes for helping me experiment with night photography and, in the process, create more memories of Kruger National Park. My WordPress theme’s white background makes these dark images challenging to see. If you click on any of the photos above, you will navigate to my Flickr site, which displays the images on a black background. On my Flickr site, there are navigation arrows you can click at the right and left edges of the window to rotate through the series.

John Steiner