Posts Tagged africa

Iconic African Sunrise – Landscape Photos of Maasai Mara, Kenya

Here’s what I can only describe as an iconic african sunrise landscape. Scenes like this are a plenty across the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya and those willing to wake up at the crack of dawn, grab a quick coffee and head out onto the grassy plains of the Maasai Mara can sit and appreciate beautiful iconic vista’s like this.


If you have never pencil’d in a trip to the Maasai Mara in Kenya on your bucket list, it’s time you do. You will be able to witness some of the most amazing wildlife spectacles on earth and get to see some of the most beautiful scenic vista’s and landscapes that Africa has to offer. Trips to the Maasai Mara get more expensive by the year so you’d better get booking and planning.


If you’re an avid photographer, consider booking through one of many photographic tour operators who know the Maasai Mara like the back of their hands. This will ensure you have enjoyable trip in the Maasai Mara and you will leave there wanting for nothing more than to return. The Maasai Mara is quite simply Africa at its finest and an experience every single person shouldn’t miss out on.


This Landscape Print “Iconic African Sunrise – Maasai Mara, Kenya” is available in print on a variety of Hahnemule Fine Art Papers, Epson Premium Papers and Canvas.

To order prints or for other enquiries on this image or other landscape images please contact me on image@mitchellkrog.com with Print REF: KEX4643MM or simply click here to order this print right now.

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Africa’s Night Skies | AstroPhotography Astro Landscapes

Dear Readers

I hope you will join me tonight on Twitter. I am being interviewed by the

Smithsonian National Museum of African Art

as part of their

African Cosmos

exhibition.

To follow the interview on Twitter make sure to follow @AfricanCosmos and @MitchellKrog. If you have any questions on my astro or lightning photography feel free to tweet them using @AfricanCosmos and #MKastro.

Below I’ve selected some of my favourite

Astrophotography

and

Astro Landscape

images shot under Africa’s Night Skies over the past few years.





ABOVE: The Lunar Eclipse of the 15th of June 2011. A very cold evening under Africa’s Night Skies with heavy dew falls caused some very interesting optical effects giving a very different view of a lunar eclipse.

ABOVE: The International Space Station (ISS) streaking across South Africa’s Night Skies on the 30th of August 2009. This Astro Landscape photograph taken on a friends farm in the North West province of South Africa.

ABOVE: The Bubbling Spacecraft Spectacle that caused a stir in South Africa on the night in took place. What many thought was a UFO (myself included) was later confirmed as a Centaur Rocket launched several hours earlier from the United States. The bubbling / ring effect was said to be venting of excess fuel from the rocket. This series of images appeared in Finnish and Russian Astronomy Magazines in December of 2009. Here’s an article on it.

ABOVE: Another photo of the Centaur Rocket Venting Excess Fuel aka The Bubbling Spacecraft UFO Spectacle.

ABOVE: The Moon is always an interesting Astrophotography subject of mine and Africa’s Night Skies offer some of the greatest locations for Moon Photography. This Perigee Full Moon was photographed on the 30th of January 2010 from my farm in Magaliesburg, South Africa.

ABOVE: The moon in totality during the Lunar Eclipse of 15th June 2011. This was an exceptionally cold night over Gauteng but when it comes to Astrophotography you simply have no choice and the coldest nights under Africa’s Night Skies are often the best.

ABOVE: For several weeks spanning March through April 2012, Venus went through some interesting conjuctions and Africa’s Night Skies offered some very different views than the rest of the world. This evening of the 12th of March I captured the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter shortly after sunset. This image was featured on SpaceWeather.com and one of their readers pointed out to me I had also captured the International Space Station (ISS) which you can see streaking in from the bottom left of the image.

ABOVE: One of my earlier Astrophotography images from 2007. This was the conjunction of Venus by the Moon.

ABOVE: Africa’s Night Skies offer great Astrophotography Star Trails opportunities. On this very cold evening I tried something different capturing not only the movement of the stars but also movement in the trees caused by a cold night wind.

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Ugandan Kob – Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

Nearing the end of our 21 day African trip, my wife and I spent 2 days in

Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda

. This turned out to be one of the most fantastic parks I’ve ever visited with a lot of different wildlife to the norm in South Africa.

For me one of the highlights of this park was the spectacular scenic vista’s throughout the park set against the most stunning and pristine grasslands.

The park offered fantastic opportunities to capture relatively simple subjects against magnificent backdrops.

This male

Ugandan Kob

stopped for a brief second to pose for me in a pristine grassland surrounded by Acacia sieberana / Paperbark’s.

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African Stormy Sunset – Thunderstorm Lightning Photography

As the sun was setting on the 24th of December 2010, the most incredible scene presented itself to me. I saw storms starting to build from around 5pm but thought they had arrived too early and the chances of catching the storms doing their thing at sunset seemed a bit of a long shot. In the last 10-15 minutes of the sun setting I saw there was a gap on the horizon and the potential for something amazing to take place. I dropped everything grabbed my camera’s and shot outside into the maize field. What happened thereafter was pure magic as nature pulled out all the stops and put on it’s fantastic light show for me. I’ve shot a few storms at sunset during the last 6 storm seasons but personally I think this one currently sits right at the top of my personal favourites and will probably remain that way until I one day (hopefully) ever top this.

I never expected anything for Christmas but Nature rolled in with this wonderful surprise for me and there’s certainly no complaints from my side.

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A Stormy Sunset with some Christmas Wishes

I’ve fallen a bit behind with blogging and releasing images as I have had a lot of other work tying up my time. Now that the year is closing I am finding a little bit of free time again so here’s a new image I processed this morning which I took a few days ago. I am now into my sixth season of photographing storms and extreme weather and have spent well over 4000 hours in the field chasing storms and never has there been a dull moment. Every storm season I wait (and wait) for at least one perfect moment when all the elements fall into place just at the right time and for me this is the challenge of capturing a lightning storm at sunset. Trust me it’s not easy because seldom do the storms approach at the right time and often when they do the sunset light is gone or the setting sun is completely blocked by the sheer size of the storm cells and if I get one image like this in a season I consider myself lucky. Getting it right requires springing into action at a moment’s notice and having a close location that you’re familiar with for capturing the scene. Nature waits for nobody and when the potential for a scene like this arises you drop everything and run, and if it fizzles out or the storm moves off in a different direction, you wait for the next one and do it all over again. In 6 seasons I’ve captured a few stormy sunset images, some more dramatic than others, but this one certainly sits high up in my list of favourites and I hope you will enjoy it too. I promised a blog post on twitter the other day called “Anatomy of a Thunderstorm” but shortly after bragging about it I got tied up in a lot of work that just kept me far away from the computer. I am in the throws of processing the images and sequences for that blog post and will release it in the next day or two, it’ll be worth the wait. It’s now only a few hours until Christmas Day and just a few days until we welcome 2011. I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a most blessed Christmas, I hope you travel safe if you are on the roads and most importantly don’t drink and drive. I’d like to thank everyone for their support during 2010 and hope to see you all back safely in the new year.

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