Namibian Nights

I recently won two First Prizes in the Travel Photographer of the Year Awards - one for a series of four night shots from Namibia, and one for a timelapse video that was also shot entirely at night in the same country.

You can watch the timelapse video here:

Namibian Nights - timelapse video

Namibia is like our second home - we've been going there every year for almost 12 years now, often multiple times. This country is night photography heaven, which is why I love it even more. I was the first photographer to create an extensive night photography portfolio from Namibia in general, and from Deadvlei in particular, and it has attracted many photographers ever since. As a result it was getting more and more difficult to create original material on my visits to Namibia, so in 2010 I decided to take it to the next level and shoot the first night timelapse of Namibia. I shot all footage for the video on multiple visits to Namibia in 2011 and 2012 - over 16,000 shots in total.

From a creative point of view it was really interesting. With still photography the most important part is getting the right composition, but when you're shooting video with a dolly you suddenly have to find two composition for each shot - a starting composition and an end composition. This turned out to be a real challenge; often I got a good composition fairly quickly, but once I started moving the camera on the rail, it didn't look so great any more. Another complicating issue was the weather - with still photography you just wait for the right light, and click. With timelapse, you have to think about what direction the moon is moving during a 5 hour period. And sometimes the weather was fine when I started shooting, and then clouds would appear after 4 hours, completely ruining the whole shoot.

When I was at this location, I had already set up my dolly with two tripods at a different scene. That meant that there were no tripods left, and those are pretty crucial for night photography. Knowing this might happen, I had brought some beanbags with me on location. I ended up balancing my D4 on one of those bags on a rock that was more or less at the right distance, and then put another bag on top to keep it there during the night. There are lots of rock hyrax hopping around here, and I didn't want one jumping on the camera.

The exposure is about 5 to 10 seconds too long, because some of the stars are getting a bit too elongated, but the funny thing is that for video it doesn't really matter, and I never meant to use this shot as a still.

Sorry for using so many words. Hope you like the video!