Africa – Chasing the Light

The Great Migration

When folks describe the great migration in East Africa as one of the natural wonders of the world….they’re not wrong! It’s an ever-changing, ever-evolving twelve month cycle in which several million Wildebeest, Zebras and various other grazers constantly move to pursue the area’s rainy cycles and subsequent greenest grasses. In their migratory path, the animals traverse from the Tanzanian southern Serengeti plains in the early part of the calendar year northward into Kenya’s Masai Mara Reserve by late summer. After spending just a few months in the Masai Mara, they return southward across the Kenya/Tanzania border, arriving back in the southern Serengeti by the end of the year, having completed their 1200 mile journey across East Africa.

Their Jan-March stay in the southern Serengeti is the Wildebeest’s calving season when experts estimate 500,000 calves are born each year. After a few months, the mothers then launch their newborns onto their annual migratory journey. It’s a perilous time for the newborns as predators are anxiously awaiting an easy meal and the herds aren’t always protective of their youngsters.

Although one can visit Tanzania and view the Great Migration at any time of the year, a substantial portion of visitors want to view the animals as they cross the Mara River on their way to and from Kenya which usually occurs in the late summer. The crossings are a life and death spectacle in which life can hang by a thread and a successful crossing can be torpedoed by high water and a fast current, by salivating Nile Crocodiles, by being too old, or by being too young.

No two crossings are the same…..sometimes a few hundred animals….sometimes many thousands. Sometimes animals arrive at the river and jump right in. Other times, they may wait hours or days to cross. As animals arrive at the river the herd grows larger and moves about with no obvious plan or direction, And then for no apparent reason, a single animal jumps into the river and is instantly followed by the entire herd.

Once the crossing begins, chaos ensues. Animals are swept downstream, young ones are separated from the herd, animals sense the crocodiles and try to return to the river bank, animals jump on top of each other and struggle to keep afloat. Most make it across but some do not.

The scene is captivating and heartbreaking at the same time. One marvels at this essential act of the natural world where life and death come together as a one act play and the strongest survive. But your heart aches for the young ones who are not strong or wily enough to conquer the current or the elderly ones who no longer have the required strength or energy.

And waiting for them are these mammoth Nile Crocodiles, the largest of which can grow to be 20 ft long and weigh as much as 2000 lbs.

As a photographer, I try to capture the many small extraordinary moments within the entire tableau that crystallize the effort and struggle of the participants.

The Great Migration is an annual “cycle of life” event in which an estimated 500,000 animals are born and 250,000 animals perish from a combination of thirst, hunger, exhaustion, or predation. It’s a Wagnerian opera on hooves and a spectacle in the truest sense of the word. If given an opportunity to witness it, don’t pass it up!

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Frank Binder

https://www.frankbinderphotography.com

Coming of Age in Ethiopia

The members of the Hamer tribe in Southern Ethiopia live traditional pastoral lives in the same way as many past generations of their tribe. As pastoralists, cattle play a significant role in the culture and mores of the tribe. Nowhere is this more evident and central to one of the Hamer’s most well known and epic ancient rites of passage; the bull jumping ceremony.

Usually occuring in Autumn, this is an elaborate three day event in which a teenage boy whom the elders regard as a coming of age adult, undergoes the traditional test which determines whether the young man is ready to own cattle and marry the bride the elders have chosen for him.

The ceremony involves much dancing and celebration as the tribe’s women, dressed in their leather clothing and sporting the traditional butter and ochre hair treatment, dance for hours in large dancing circles.

**Dancing during the Bull Jumping tradition**

To accompany their dancing the women blast horns as the bells attached to their legs ring out.

Before the ceremony, female relatives (with the exception of little girls) of the young man meet the Maza, men who have just passed the bull-jumping ceremony and who temporarily live apart from the rest of the tribe.

In what some might consider a brutal tradition, they demand to be whipped with birch branches by these men as a way of showing their dedication and loyalty towards their male relatives. The idea here is to create a strong bond – an obligation – between them.

As they have undergone such pain so stoically on his behalf, he should feel a debt to protect them in the future. This also signals their attractiveness as a future wife, and it becomes a kind of competition, with women refusing to back down and vowing to each endure the most pain.

One of the young men who have already completed the bull jumping task and are supporting the current jumper

As the celebratory day passes the bulls are gathered in preparation for the ritual test.

The men struggle to line up seven to ten bulls so the test can begin

Both ends of the bull are used to exert leverage.

After the bull wrangling is completed and the bulls are lined up, the backs of the bulls are slathered with dung to make them slippery and increase the difficulty of the task. The bull jumper is also slathered in dung and must make four passes across the backs of the bulls without falling. Should he fall short, he will wait a year to attempt the task again.

If successful, he will be eligible to marry the woman chosen by his parents. Bridal payments to the bride’s family are in the range of 30 goats and 20 cattle.

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Frank Binder

Ethiopia is such a remarkable country….a land of astonishing physical beauty, the only place on Earth with the spectacular Gelada baboon, a country where our earliest ancestors roamed, a place with ties to King Solomon and events in the Old Testament, and home to some of the most colorful ancient tribes on Earth.

Lucy, one of our earliest hominid ancestors, was discovered in 1974 in northeastern Ethiopia by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson. Named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” Lucy was dated to be 3.2 million years old (that’s a lot of candles on her birthday!), stood about 3 1/2 ft. tall and weighed about 65 pounds. Subsequently other older ancestors dating back almost 7 million years have been found in Ethiopia but none is as renowned as Lucy.

In the country’s Omo valley, indigenous tribes have been painting their bodies with pulverized minerals for millenia. In the Lower Omo Valley of southwest Ethiopia, eastern South Sudan and around Lake Turkana in north Kenya reside over 500,000 indigenous, tribal people. Many are agro-pastoralists who live close to the river or lake during the dry season but return to the grasslands when the rains come. The young men have the responsibility of grazing the cattle and they have long slathered on clay to prevent sunburn. Colors are used to designate position, for ritual, to ward off illness, to attract the opposite sex, to associate with family, a tribe or an animal, and in the last ten years… to impress tourists and attract photographers.

Photographers have been coming to the Omo to be able to capture portrait images like this one. She is the wife of a young man who acted as my guide during our visit to this village.

This is a natural light image. I placed her just inside the entrance to their abode and let the outside light softly light her face. I concentrated on ensuring that her closest eye was in perfect focus.

A few other helpful portrait hints….Keep the background simple and neutral. And side lighting (rather than direct head on lighting) gives a portrait more drama and character.

This mother is rocking a traditional look for women in her village. Her leather garments, snail-shell necklace and braided hair treated with local ochre colored mud are the hallmarks of the her Hamer heritage.

These girls and women in a remote Dassanech village are working hard grinding their local grain into flour.

This young boy getting a bath illustrates the water challenges of the village and of the region in general. Obtaining water is one of the major daily activities undertaken by women in Africa. This woman likely carried a twenty gallon container of water from the local river ( a 1/2 mile away) to her home. And most likely did it by balancing the container on her head! Her use of the water bottle to bathe her child is simply a judicious way of using the water that she worked so hard to obtain.

In some respects women are the pack mules of their families. This woman is returning to her village from the local town with her purchases of straw and other sundry items. I personally witnessed her walk 1 1/2 miles to this point and followed her with my eyes as she seemed to walk into infinity on this road. She wasn’t pleased that I took this photograph.

A face that's been lived in — A face that’s been lived in

In our journey through Ethiopia, we overnighted in a small town and my colleague Dave and I decided to amble through the downtown area to see if we could stumble into anything interesting. We came across a small coffee cafe (Ethiopia is one of the coffee capitals of the world) and this fellow enjoying an afternoon cup of Joe. He was gracious enough to allow me to photograph him. It’s one of my favorite portraits from my trip. I love everything about this portrait….from the jaunty way his hat balances on his head to his character lined face.

Taken only a few minutes after the portrait above. As we wandered through town we eventually collected 25-30 children who followed us in our little photographic sojourn. We loved taking photos of them as they were so excited when we showed them the LCD images on the back of our cameras.

I was able to gather these five for a group portrait. Notice the facial expressions and reactions to being photographed. The two girls on the left (sisters) were very cool and collected, the young girl and boy in the middle are excited and the young girl on the right is nonplussed.

Such an incredibly photogenic set of subjects! The Omo Valley and it’s traditional and colorful set of tribes is a photographers delight. But the traditions and very existence of the ways of life are under stress for a variety of reasons. There are economic development water projects that threaten the downstream lifeblood flow of the Omo River, a growing tourist activity that threatens to overwhelm and change the local ways, and finally the normal march of progress that improves people’s lives.

Finally one last portrait. Notice the piece taken out of his upper ear…..most likely the result of a coming of age ceremony as a young man.

Thank you for reading my latest blog entry. If you thought it was worthy of your time and you hadn’t already done so, please take the opportunity to subscribe by clicking the “Follow” button in the middle of the right side of this page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Also, you can share this blog entry on your Facebook page by clicking the share button below or you can email it to folks by clicking on the “Email” button.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

During my recent photographic journey to Ethiopia (with intrepid African Photographer Piper McKay), our small band of photographers climbed into Simien National Park which contains Ethiopia’s highest peak, Ras Dejen at 15,000 ft. Over millions of years the area’s plateaus have eroded to form precipitous cliffs and deep gorges of exceptional natural beauty. While we appreciated the spectacular surroundings, we were there to photograph some of the park’s most famous residents, Gelada baboons. And I couldn’t have been more excited….after all how often do you see Italian ice cream loving baboons?

The identifying mark of these wonderful animals is a red heart on their chests which cause some to call them “bleeding heart monkeys”. They are actually monkeys in genus…the last surviving branch of the Gelada ancestral tree.

Geladas spend much of their morning grooming each other to make sure that they are looking good as they venture out onto the grasslands to feed. Here a female grooms a sister Gelada as a little one is sheltered.

Gelada are herbivores but have very large predator like teeth and can look fierce when they draw back their lips and show off their bicuspids.

untitled-5 — Just back from getting my hair done!

We saw several large troupes of Geladas each day with each group being at least one hundred animals. To protect themselves from predators, Geladas spend their nights perched on steep cliffsides and emerge at dawn each morning as they make their way up and over cliff rims to spend the day socializing and feeding.

Each troupe featured large numbers of youngsters from newborns to teenage equivalents. The babies often travel on Mom’s back and resemble jockies riding in a race.

If you remain still and unthreatening the Geladas will become comfortable with your presence. This duo was within 6 ft. as they passed by.

The troupe would move over large distances during the day in search of pristine grasses. I found a favorite photographic tactic which was to plant myself on the ground in the direction the troupe was heading and wait for them to arrive. Soon I was surrounded by animals who completely ignored me as I furiously snapped my shutter.

Mothers keep their newborns very close and are wary. I found that if I was quiet and moved slowly I could get quite close to this pair and spent 10-15 minutes photographing them after they came to ignore me.

These two young boys followed us one day in hopes of selling their portrait to us. I couldn’t resist. Those blankets weren’t for show…it was cold at 10,000 ft!

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

“Baby, you know I ain’t no Queen of Sheba” (Thing called Love; Bonnie Raitt). I didn’t go to Ethiopia to discover Sheba but rather to photograph ancient religious ceremonies, unique Gelada baboons and native indigenous tribes. But after engaging our guide Danny, with rudimentary questions about Ethiopia’s history, I was sucked into the quasi-historical tale of Ethiopia’s early Queen traveling to meet Israel’s King Solomon and spawning a son Menelik who Ethiopians regard as the founder and first Emperor of 10^th century BC Ethiopia. Menelik is customarily credited for bringing the original Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia where believers say it currently resides in an Aksum church.

As if this wasn’t a dizzying enough historical journey, Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s last reigning emperor claimed to be the 225th descendent of King Solomon. Wow!…..my photographic journey had turned into an Indiana Jones script!

These traditional beliefs intertwining the Old Testament and the Solomonic dynasty with the fourth century introduction of Christianity form the basis of today’s Eastern Orthodox Ethiopian Church. Although Ethiopians consider Axsum to be the heart of Christianity in Ethiopia, the modest town of Lalibella is its soul.

For Lalibella is home to eleven rock-hewn churches which are a wondrous testament to what ancient Ethiopians were able to accomplish with a few hand tools and a mission to honor their faith. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the churches were not built… but rather sculpted from top to bottom from huge monolithic red blocks of volcanic rock .

St George’s church is the cleanest example of the task. Built around the turn of the first millennium, laborers working from top to bottom, initially excavated all of the solid rock around the church. This was the easy part. Then they hollowed out the church from bottom to top, created windows, steps, and various other decorative touches inside the church….all with simple hand tools.

The Christmas Eve ceremonial mass held in St. Mary’s church was a stunning cross-pollination of traditional Christian rites and world-class performance art. Attended by thousands of religious pilgrims and performed by hundreds of white-robed priests, the pageantry in the form of singing, chanting, and cavalcades of umbrella toting processionals went on for many hours into the night and culminated in a final regal morning processional by the senior prelates outside the church.

Lalibella is a dusty town of about 20,000 inhabitants in northern Ethiopia. During the church’s Christmas celebrations 50,000 religious pilgrims, many of whom walk long distances, attend the ceremonies. Because of differences between the Ethiopan calendar and the more commonly used Gregorian calendar, Christmas in Ethiopia occured this year on January 7th.

Many of the churches are connected with tunnels and trenches and throngs of pilgrims use these pathways to visit the churches after the ceremonies conclude.

The light flowing through this portal lit up this young girl in a very arresting way.

Most of the pilgrims take advantage of specially designated camping areas around town where large sprawling masses of families alight and whose daily life is on display as we walked through the camping areas. In a short time we saw livestock being slaughtered for the nightly meal, women cooking in large pots over open fires, large prayer groups, and frolicking children everywhere.

This pilgrim climbed onto an elevated perch in a small maintenance building and used it to survey campground life.

This is a common scene as women (and it was all women) prepare meals for their families over open fires. This looks to be a very common Ethiopian dish of meat with shiro and berbere spices.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

Africa – The Big Cats

The King

If we play a word association game and I say…..Africa!…. many of you will say…… Lions! And I would say Bingo! The King of the Jungle resides on the plains of Africa and I can tell you it’s a thrill the first time you see a lion in its natural habitat and you realize exactly why you came to Africa in the first place. It’s to see the big cats. A visit to Africa is exciting and worthwhile in so may ways but seeing and photographing lions is the capstone experience.

Historically lions used to roam south-east Europe, India and all of Africa but todays world lion population of approximately 25,000 lions reside in southern and eastern Africa. Males can weigh as much as 500 lbs with females considerably lighter. Lions are the only member of the cat family in which the males and females look distinctly different.

Lions are the only social species of cats and congregate into Prides of ten-twenty lions. Like elephants, the groupings are matriarchal and most hunting is done by females.

This young male and two brothers killed a Cape Buffalo (weighing roughly 2,000 lbs.) and feasted on the carcass for several hours. It’s one of the enticing and sometimes grizzly aspects of viewing predators in the wild….the full life cycle unfolds right before your eyes.

This young cub ran around with the remnant of a kill made just a few hours ago and we watched him being chased by his siblings as if they were playing a game of “keep away”. It’s the lion equivalent of a soccer ball.

It almost looks like these two were posing for a photographer. This Pride of lions was featured in the BBC series “Big Cat Diaries”. The Pride contained a lot of cubs and young juvenile lions who cavorted and romped with each other much the same way young domestic kittens do. For photographers, arriving at a scene with lion cubs out in the open playing with each other is the cats meow ( see what I did there?)

This Pride is called the “Marsh Pride” for obvious reasons.

Lions are very affectionate and it’s not uncommon to see cubs, juveniles and lionesses lying amongst and overlapping each other with lots of licking and nuzzling going on.

Leopards are the second largest of the three large cat families in Africa although they are much smaller than lions. Unlike lions, leopards are solitary creatures and mothers raise their offspring alone without the aid of a social grouping. They have large heads and very strong jaws and shoulders allowing them to drag kills weighing more than they up into trees where they can devour them without being threatened by other predators.

Leopards are scarcer in the wild than lions and getting un-obscured images of them doesn’t happen on every safari. We were thrilled to find this young leopard out in the open in his tree perch.

As we were photographing this young cat, a lioness was circling the tree below. Amazingly he was totally unconcerned about the twenty or so safari vehicles trying to get a view of him but focused his attention on the threat posed by lioness.

Cheetahs are the third and smallest of the three big cat species in Africa. Renown for their speed and agility, they are also solitary animals where mothers raise cubs alone. With small heads and long legs and tails they can run up to 70 mph in short bursts. Hunts usually last only 30-60 seconds and are successful only 50% of the time.

This cheetah killed the Impala shortly before we arrived on the scene and is stressed by the numerous vultures and cranes waiting for the cheetah to abandon the kill so they can move in. After feeding for a while the cheetah departed and the vultures began what can only be described as a vicious food fight. Within fifteen minutes the Impala was only a skeleton.

This Mom had six cubs but by the time we came upon her only five remained. Cheetah cubs have high mortality rates since they are easy prey for most of the other predators on the savannah. We photographed this cheetah family for about an hour and it was a highlight of the trip…..Absolutely nothing is cuter or more photogenic than a litter of cheetah cubs in full play mode.

Thank you for reading my latest blog entry. If you thought it was worthy of your time and you hadn’t already done so, please take the opportunity to subscribe by clicking the “Follow” button on the right side of the page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Also, you can share this blog entry on your Facebook page by clicking the share button below or you can email it to folks by clicking on the “Email” button. Frank Shrewsbury, MA

The Maasai are a semi-nomadic people inhabiting portions of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. During my recent photographic trip to Kenya I visited several Maasai villages and had the opportunity to photograph traditional Maasai ceremonies as well as make candid portraits of these regal people.

Maasai tradition call for boys to be circumcised at ages 12-13 and spend the next 10-15 years performing traditional cattle herding duties on the tribal lands sometimes in places quite distant and remote from their villages. After performing this extended duty for the village, young men return to marry a teenage bride usually selected by the parents. This young man is being decorated in preparation for an Adumu or “jumping dance” which we were able to photograph.

The jumping dance is intended to strengthen the men’s legs in preparation for the rigorous herding tasks ahead.

Many of these women are stunning and would be at home on a Vogue cover! The colorful dress is the norm in the village but the accessorizing of jewelry, headwear and body paint is part of the special preparation for the ceremonies.

This is one of those stunning women. She would turn a lot of heads if she were strutting down 5th Ave or the Champs-Elysees in the latest haute couture outfit.

The young men apply each others decoration and use mirrors to admire their look. The ochre color comes from the dominant earth tones in the area.

This portrait was taken inside one of the village huts/homes which have a rounded rectangular shape and are constructed from grass, sticks, mud and cow dung. The homes are without running water or electricity and contain fire pits which are used for warmth and cooking.

The light for this image originates from a small window on the side of the building and provides nice soft lighting for a dramatic portrait.

This young man created fire from a couple of tufts of dry grass and a stick. Very impressive.

After marrying men gradually gain seniority in the village and some rise to the position of village elder where they provide advice and governance in the Maasai way.

I worked with these little guys for 20 minutes and finally got them to relax and not “pose” for the camera. Once they forget there’s a camera there, the magic can begin.

Thank you for reading my latest blog entry. If you thought it was worthy of your time and you hadn’t already done so, please take the opportunity to subscribe by clicking the “Follow” button on the right side of the page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Also, you can share this blog entry on your Facebook page by clicking the share button below or you can email it to folks by clicking on the “Email” button.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

“But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.”
― Lawrence Anthony, The Elephant Whisperer

Here's looking at you! — Here’s looking at you!

Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya boasts the best opportunity in Africa to see free ranging elephants up close and personal. Home to approximately 1,000 elephants, the park’s dusty savannahs draw thousands of visitors annually. And although the park contains its share of lions, cheetahs, cape buffalos and other prominent wildlife species, most visitors come to Amboseli to see the elephants against the backdrop of Mt. Kilimanjaro which overlooks the park from nearby Tanzania.

The park, at approximately 150 square miles, consists mostly of large open grassy plains and several large swampy areas fed by streams flowing down from Kilimanjaro.

Elephants are social creatures who organize themselves into matriarchal herds usually led by the oldest and largest female. Herds range in size with the largest herds containing up to 50 elephants.

Most elephants in Amboseli spend their nights in the forests at the base of Kilimanjaro and spend their days in the swamps eating up to 300 lbs. of vegetation. Visitors to the park seek out the long lines of elephants as they make their way to and from the swampy eating and drinking sites and delight in seeing the tiny elephant calves walking among the hulking adults.

One of the most startling and unexpected observations one makes from seeing elephants in the wild for a few days is the amount of “personality” exhibited by the pachyderms both as individuals and in groups. In the same sense that one envisions teenage boys roughhousing and wrestling with one another….so did we witness young male elephants roughhousing and pushing each other around. We also saw the tenderness and affection displayed by mothers toward their offspring that one commonly sees in humans and other animal species.

Unfortunately the demand for ivory as a status symbol in China (and to a lesser extent other countries in Asia) has caused catastrophic elephant poaching in Africa. According to a recently published study by the National Academy of Sciences, 100,000 African elephants were killed from 2010 – 2012 and Central Africa lost 64% of its elephants in a decade. Remediation efforts are uneven, particularly in the more strife ridden areas of the continent, but countries like Kenya have enacted strict laws and rigorous enforcement policies to combat the problem. Hopefully this and education efforts in Asia will begin to curb the killing. Otherwise, at the current rate of population loss and as hard as it may be to contemplate, experts estimate that elephants will disappear from Africa in 10 years.

Although elephants are surely the prime attraction in Amboseli, other animals and the spectacular African sunrises and sunsets are not far behind.

I love this image because it captures so many special elements of being in Africa…the wonderful sunrises and sunsets, the beautiful Acacia trees that dot the landscape and of course the zebras ambling across the savannah.

I went to Africa with the irrepressible professional photographer Piper Mackay, whose passion for Africa is boundless. She urged us to take advantage of the dusty Amboseli conditions to make images with drama and character by allowing the backlit sun to light up the dust. She was so right!

The back lit sun adds so much flow and perspective to the above three images. Thanks, Piper.

No post about Amboseli would be complete without a shot of wildlife under the gaze of Africa’s greatest mountain (and also the world’s tallest freestanding mountain).

Thank you for reading my latest blog entry. If you thought it was worthy of your time and you hadn’t already done so, please take the opportunity to subscribe by clicking the “Follow” button on the right side of the page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Also, you can share this blog entry on your Facebook page by clicking the share button below or you can email it to folks by clicking on the “Email” button.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

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