Excellent pics! Your gorilla photos are outstanding! Thanks!

They're great photos. You had a lot of sunlight while photographing the gorillas, or at least it appears so.

Take your time with your report. I understand not everyone likes to do them (I don't), but your trip looks quite fascinating so whatever info you can provide would be tremendously helpful.

I enjoyed your photos. Thanks!

Beautiful photos, and I love that you have so many shots of people and villages and yourselves. Looks like you had an amazing trip. I look forward to hearing more about it when you get the chance.

Darren,

Thanks for sharing your wonderful photos!!!!

We took the same picture of the sign in Tarangire .

It looks like you had a fantastic trip.


Jenn

HI Darren,
I've only had a chance to look through your Rwanda and Nairobi almbum yet. The photos are fabulous.
What beach were you at in Rwanda - it looks beautiful?
Also, do you remember the names of the different antelope in Nairobi NP? There are definately two species I haven't seen before. AND did you go to the orphanage at KWS?

Looks like the KWS and Giraffe Centre were relatively quiet the day you were there - both were mobbed when we went - but it was a Saturday!

Imelda

What a wonderful trip - petting cheetahs, kissing giraffes, hiking to the Susa gorillas. You have some wonderful photos! Loved the weaver birds on the vehicle door. Best was the impish baboon with the elf ears in Tarangire. Zanzibar sky shots are breathtaking. You all packed a lot into one trip!! Deb

Hi Darren-

I Have just looked at the highlights album - fabulous! Looks like you have some great people shots in there - can't wait to see the rest at lunch today!

Lynda

Darren,
Thanks for sharing your beautiful photos. The gorilla photos are just amazing. The grass in the topi photo doesn’t look good, but the topis themselves look good as always. The crazy Ngorongoro hippo looks interesting. Could you jump into the pool from your room balcony at the Dhow Palace? Nice to see Nairobi NP and Sheldrick’s, though the orphanage definitely looks like a zoo. I think you’ll write a very interesting trip report.

Thanks for sharing these. Looking forward to your report whenever you get a chance.

Thanks for the comments, everyone! Glad you like the photos!

Imelda, to answer your questions:
(1) The beach is on Lake Kivu in Gisenyi (the building with the red roof in the photo behind me is actually over the border in Congo) -- we had a great time just relaxing on the beach with fanta drinks and talking with Abi and Omar,
(2) I believe the antelope in the photos from Nairobi NP are hartebeests and bushbucks (female and male) but please correct me if I'm wrong, and
(3) Yep, we took a tour of the KWS Animal Orphanage which included quality time with the 3 cheetahs -- you can see the photos in the "Nairobi" album.

Deb, yeah we packed in as much as we could! Glad you appreciated the shots of the young baboon and the weavers on the car door (thanks to our driver Hassan for advising us to eat our lunch in the Landcruiser so we wouldn't be attached by dive-bombing birds). The sky in Zanzibar looked even more amazing in person!

Nyamera, my photo album from Zanzibar is one big advertisement for the Dhow Palace Hotel -- we loved that place! And the pool was very inviting after a long, hot and sweaty day. The grass in the Topi photo is not looking too good because the wildebeests had chomped through most of it on their migration through the Serengeti. The crazy Ngorongoro hippo was cracking us up as he tried to get the seaweed off his face by whipping his head around -- poor guy could have really used a pair of hands. Sheldrick's in Nairobi is so much more popular now than when I was there in 1996. Back then, we basically had an elephant all to ourselves and now you have to stay behind a rope and jostle for position to interact with one.

Thanks again! I'll try to write up a report as soon as I can...
Darren

Darren, enjoyed the photographs. And, a big "thank you" for captions. Know it took some effort but really added to my enjoyment. Dick

Thanks a lot, Darren. It is always nice to watch animalpictures but even more rewarding when people and everdaypictures are added.

Siro

Thanks again to everyone for your comments. I love how everyone in this group is so friendly and supportive. I definitely couldn't have planned our trip without the help from the people in this forum.

I have made a couple additions to my Flickr account.

First, I have uploaded 50+ photos from our friends John and Kathleen who accompanied us on our safari in Tanzania and trip to Zanzibar. (They started off their trip by trekking Kilimanjaro at the same time that we were visiting the gorillas in Rwanda, and then they came back to the USA when we flew to Nairobi from Zanzibar.) Their photos kind of "fill in the gaps" where I wasn't able to get the best shots. Highlights are photos of an egyptian goose, a very young zebra, an owl, a boomslang snake and a close-up of a bird on a giraffe's mane. You can either look at the photo sets to see their photos mixed in chronological order with my photos or just visit the tail of my photostream and work back through a little over 3 pages:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kumasawa/

Second, I have used Flickr's new geotagging feature to place my Africa photos on a map. Unfortunately, the level of detail in Yahoo Maps is pretty poor outside the USA, so I was not able to place them as precisely as I wanted to, but you still get a pretty good idea of where we visited. Go to this page and then search for photos like "Rwanda" or "safari" or "zanzibar" or "Nairobi":
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kumasawa/map/

Cheers,
Darren

Darren:
It´s the KWS orphanage with the cheetah hug that I find very zoo-like. Sheldrick´s looks very busy though. At Voi my driver and I had the elephants completely to ourselves.

Talking about the orphanage … Are the baby antelopes a baby bushbuck and a baby tommie?

Hi Nyamera,
Wow, I totally misunderstood your previous comment. Sorry about that. Yes, the KWS orphanage is set up like a zoo with all of the animals behind fences. We didn't interact with any of the animals except the cheetahs.

And I agree that the 2 young antelope in that one picture are a bushbuck and a Thomson's gazelle.

Darren

beautiful photographs!!!

i've been following your other posts on "best camera". i just purchased an Canon S3 this week and am starting to have fun learning it before our upcoming trip to Kenya in Nov. Your last post has made me re think my Scan Disk card needs. what did you have the camera set at for resolution and did you keep it set the same for all your photos? i will hopefully be able to down load a few times as we have family in Nariobi and we'll be back and forth through there a few times, but i might get another card or 2.

any tips on the camera, likes or dislikes would be helpful. i love taking pictures, but i'm a novice. Again i really enjoyed your pictures

joyce

Hi Joyce,

I'm glad you liked my photos! I kept my camera set on Large image size and Superfine compression.

I'm a novice photographer myself (never used an SLR), so I'm afraid that I can't offer you too many tips. I always keep Image Stabilization on, but set to "shoot only" mode. Most of the time, I shot in "Auto" mode, but I did switch to "P" mode sometimes to try different ISO settings depending on the lighting. For a few photos, I used the Stitch, Landscape and Sports modes (the latter for trying to capture fast-moving objects). I don't like to use digital zoom, but I found that I had to use it for a lot of the photos in my "Tanzania Safari" photo set.

Keep practicing! I didn't have enough time to learn all of the features and practice with the different modes. For example, there will probably be times when you have to try to use manual focus because there will be an animal in the grass and the camera is auto-focusing on the grass in front of the animal instead of the animal iteself.

Here are some links that I found useful:
http://www.photoxels.com/digital-photography-tutorials.html
http://web.canon.jp/Imaging/pss3is/components-e.html
http://www.flickr.com/groups/s2is/discuss/72057594077164132/

Also, it helps to read the posts in the "Canon" forum on dpreview.com. I don't understand most of the talk, but it's slowly making sense.

Good luck and have fun with the camera!
Darren

Darren - It looks like you guys had such a good time on this trip! The photos are just great - I would love to see what you would do with a DSLR because you certainly made some fabulous photos with your S3. Hmmm...
Did you take any videos with it?

Thanks for sharing!
Sharon

Your animal highlights are exactly that. I bet it was hard to narrow it down.

Your Rwanda gorillas were excellent. Which group did you see? You also went to the golden monkeys from the pix.

Beautiful, colorful Zanzibar photos. You even got Colobus monkeys.

You had a well rounded trip.