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I apologize for not getting to blog as often as I should lately. I have been in the field almost continually since April, and am writing this in South Africa after taking a break from 20 days of continuous  shooting.  My fall schedule doesn’t look much easier with two more overseas trips and five workshops. I’m hoping to make January a vacation month, but we’ll see.  With most of my friends retired, it seems I just have to work more, but I’m not complaining. My total days in the field this year will be over 250,  the same number I commonly worked in my 30’s  and 40’s. 

I had been wanting to come to South Africa for years, and actually had another trip booked which I cancelled due to lack of rainfall on the West Coast flower fields.  Photographing the amazing bloom here was my main reason for coming, but Africa has so many charms and is so seductive that I have been mesmerized with all I have seen,  photographed and felt.  

The national parks here have a great system of chalets, usually just a dozen or so, that are wonderful places to stay. They are cheap, the architecture has been well thought out, and for photographers, you are allowed to stay in the park and not subject to opening and closing times.  Speaking of opening and closing,  the Namaqualand flowers only open their blooms on sunny days and reach their peak of beauty in the early afternoon.  After a lifetime of trying to use  early and late light,  it was a little more leisurely  to go to work at noon rather than six in the morning.  

Several areas that have historically great blooms have been made into national parks,  but we found several amazing sites on our own, and we made many stops along the highway as we saw fields of pink, lavender, yellow, red, blue, purple, white, maroon, and every color in between. The numbers of species and the numbers of flowers is staggering.  After seeing this, shooting a solitary paintbrush in Arches   will seem a little underwhelming, but each is beautiful in its own way. 

Since the flowers bloom in the windy part of the day,  I mitigated the wind problem by cranking up the ISO on my new Canon Mark II.  The high ISO also came in handy when I shot some of the world’s best rock art in Kamberg where tripods are not allowed.  I  experimented with some high ISO Milky Way shots that also worked very well. 

Sometimes I felt flowers had taken over the world.  We came into one town that was literally covered with yellow flowers on every surface except the sidewalks and road ways.  The surrounding mountains were also yellow.  Another small town was overrun with purple flowers, again growing on every available surface except the streets.  It seemed that flowers appeared from barren fields overnight.  We kept saying, “There was nothing there yesterday!”

We also spent quite a bit of time in the Cedarberg Mountains just 100 miles north of  Cape Town.  During three epic hikes  in this World Heritage Site,   I saw no other people,  photographed an arch that had most likely a world record of six openings,   and hiked to the top of the range during a heavy spring snow.   The rock formations in Cedarberg were right up there in beauty, strangeness and complexity with those of the Colorado Plateau, and the region’s plant and animal life far-surpassed our home desert in terms of numbers of species.  Rock art, left by the now vanished San bushmen people, is also everywhere, although many of the best sites are on private land which surrounds the wilderness area.  One private lodge costing many hundreds of dollars a night has some of the best,  but only guests are allowed to see it.  

Seeing snow in Africa was also a treat.   We weathered several cold fronts in western South Africa, but the last one laid down a massive amount of white above 4,000 feet.  Though similar in many ways to the cold fronts that attack Utah in the spring and winter, the nearness of the ocean provides a great deal more moisture for these storms, so there was plenty of rain with the wind at lower elevations.  Somehow the rocks of the Cedarberg are almost redder than the ones at home,  and combining the snowy peaks with the lush flowers and red rocks of the valleys kept me busy for several days.

Our hike to the Maltese Cross formation, like the one to the famous Wolfberg Arch, took us to the heights of the range.   As we reached the snow level,  the warm spring sun was melting and  sending roaring waterfalls everywhere.  As we went higher and temperatures dropped, the falls diminished and then ceased. At the Cross itself, a 200 foot free standing pinnacle,  cold winds blew and the snow relented long enough for me to get a shot,  but we quickly left this austere realm—deep in the wilds of a wild continent. It was unforgettable. 

 Again, after just celebrating my sixtieth birthday,  I couldn’t imagine carrying my 4×5 to all these places, but many times I wished I had it.    The San rock art in Kamberg is supposedly some of the best in world, and assuredly it is amazing.  Again, the hike was so long and steep that I’m not sure if I’d made it with a large format camera.  

The half mens trees in another World Heritage Site, The Richtersveld National Park,  have been a subject I’ve wanted to photograph from many years.  When I visited Namibia I saw some images of these most photogenic trees that get their name from their limbs that look like arms and a blooming top that looks, especially in the distance like a shock of human hair.  In other words, the trees look “half human.” Add this to the baboon whose “talk” sometimes sounds very much like human speech and the hyenas with a nearly human laugh and the lonely African veld suddenly seems to be alive with the ghosts of human visitors.   

These rare trees seem to grow in only a few small areas,  in small numbers with the backcountry of the wild Richterveld Park their main home.   I was lucky to find a small forest of about two dozen trees there, along with a day with good clouds and good light.  Each tree is a different work of nature’s art.  Many were  ready to bloom, though who knows when.  We saw thousands of Protea trees and only one had blooms.  I believe a photography book could be done of the half mens trees and even with a few hundred specimens to work with, each image would be interesting and beautiful.  

There is so much beauty in this country that the pressing human problems (ones that we are immune to in America) are particularly sad.  I found everyone of every race here to be friendly, kind,  open to strangers, and proud of their heritage. Frankly, I’ve found that everywhere I’ve gone in the world.  

I want to thank my buddy Glen Lathrop for helping me set up this trip and lending moral and logistical help as he has done throughout my career. He has saved my life a number of times, and together with our combined travel experience, we are still a formidable team of geezers. Also thanks to Lucy in my office for helping me straighten out the credit card mess and holding down the fort, and my close friend Barbara, for being so concerned about my safety in a sometimes dangerous place.