looks like a monster silhouette made by fingers
and this KIMEMO, for Kilimanjaro, Meru and Monduli, the neighboring mountains. This is the center where I lately put some pictures on exhibition. Maybe I’ll organise a proper exhibition here. 5 nice cottages for long term visitors, and a center will all amenities.
lake Manyara can offer the same salt patterns as Eyasi but for some reasons, it was that day more flooded. Different rain pattern or more inlets.
lots of escarpments in the area.
salt marks but only on the edge.
mostly brownish tones. I’ve never seen red colors here as with lake Natron.
Ngorongoro mountains underneath the clouds.
the beach, the salt marks in white, then some brackish waters.
some weather phenomenon must explain why those clouds stubbornly stayed over the Ngorongoro crater.
a river carving its way through.
round trip to Shinyanga, middle of nowhere. Only positive aspect about this flight is to fly overhead lake Eyasi, located just south of Ngorongoro crater. This is another salt lake like Natron, Manyara, Bogoria…all more or less in line in the Rift Valley.
western shoreline, the parallel salt lines are very visible here.
except for the colors, the patterns are quite similar to lake Natron, salt being pushed by the wind here and there, leaving artistic marks.
dry river coming from the cliff.
like all the salt lakes I know in Tanzania, this one is shallow, very shallow. So as soon as the dry season sets in, the water evaporates at an apparent quick rate and leaves salt islands behind.
underneath the clouds, the Ngorongoro mountains. In the foreground, that escarpment is where the Serengeti, spreading to the left, stops in this area. More dry rivers where trees have a better chance to grow alongside.
other flying days can be a bit less interesting than the Kilimanjaro flight posted a few days ago but still…
Mt Meru around 6h30, waiting for the passengers as usual. At least this scenery is quite interesting to watch early morning. Changing light, changing clouds…
watching the cloud layers on the way.
in Nairobi, Wilson airport, apparently the Kenya Air Force found some money for a bit of flying exercise. I still haven’t any of their jet fighters either. I had never seen those helicopters in 10 years. Puma, made in France.
and below the flight back from Nairobi. All this variety on one hour of flight.
pastel clouds.
sunset setting in, bits of bright light between dark clouds.
area called West Kilimanjaro.
sunset.
finally my new photographic toys have arrived, brought from Europe with love by Karine.
The superb Rolleiflex 3.5 F is in perfect condition, built in 1960 more or less. The technical name is TLR, aka Twin Lens Reflex.I had to choose between the early ones made in 1929, abit risky to buy for a regular use, till 1993 for this kind of TLR. Rollei company still exists. It was an old dream to shoot in medium format, that is 6x6 cm on film 120, which is indeed square pictures. The F series was the last model to be fully mechanical, full of cogs and springs. The models have quite changed in more than 60 years but the body is still roughly the same. After this one, electronic shutters and so on jumped in. Less attractive to me. I can’t wait to use this camera, mostly in black’n’white as I can develop that here myself. Nevertheless it is an old mechanical camera, I’m impressed by all the little subtleties and options. But the handbook only contains 20 pages or so. A dream as opposed to the actual digital camera hand books which contain hundreds of pages. I’ll shoot slides too (Kodachrome maybe?) but rather just before my next return to Europe for swift processing. Mom has offered me this camera as a gift for my 40th birthday! That’s her 3rd set of camera she gave me. Thanks Mom!
all wrapped up in leather casing, including filters and other little things. Out of fashion for sure but as Karine said when she bought it and tested it for me in Paris, she got more people looking at her than with her digital Nikon! The same when she was using her monstrous Polaroid 600 SE, the thing is as big as a soccer ball.
with the visor opened up. To shoot a standard picture forces you to place the camera on your chest or belly and look down through the visor. Notice the silver crank half spread out on the left, that is to move the film and cock the shutter.
this how it looks like when looking down on the view finder. Quite a large picture. The focus ring with solar light meter is the big knob on the left.
and for my 40th birthday, Karine offered me this other beauty. Thanks too! I’ve mentioned these Russian Zorki cameras in a some previous posts. This one is a Zorki 2, an exact copy labeled Zorki so not a fake I insist, of the famous Leica II with its collapsible lens. Originally built in the 30’s, the Leica II has evolved a lot but remains a logical camera, was a state-of-the-art camera by then. The lenses were so good that Leica allows them to be used with an adapter on actual Leica M like the one I’ve got. Even the new digital Leica M8 would accept such a lens too. As I said earlier too, I’ll get a real Leica II one day but I don’t want to use such a real vintage camera in African conditions.
that’s a Leica M6 with its collapsible lens out, see the family pattern?
With Leica, in a different format, Rollei has offered most of the best and famous pictures from last century. The philosophy is quite different than digital. Each picture costs you something, the camera doesn’t do anything automatically for you, all the settings have to be thought carefully before shooting. You have to think and tell the camera what to do. And having used this technology myself already, it made me respect these ancient photographers even more!
Ok, time to go for fun and shoot now.
I could have given the same title as the previous posts about the interesting sides of bush flying…
there are flying days like that, when the moment is just magic, and it is then worth the rest of the occasional bad day. The rainy season is the best for that magic moment, for aerial pictures. The dust has gone, the visibility is perfect, the clouds are incredible, the colors explode..;well for those who can look and enjoy that is. Today was a typical dry day, like flying in fog but it was only dust made shiny by the sun. Nothing great. But the pictures below were taken in one round trip to Nairobi last week. It shows perfectly the evolution of light or clouds during the day. Just before sunset, the golden glow as it is called amongst photographers and probably others doesn’t happen that often because different parameters are required in the recipe to get it. But when it appears, it creates a visual orgasm.
in the afternoon, around 3pm. Lots of clouds but the star is visible, including the secondary peak on the left, rarely covered by snow. Already nice feeling to see it like this.
then on the way back from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro airport, around 6pm, the clouds have dropped a bit. The light comes at a low angle, creating nice shades in the cumulus clouds.
it must be much darker below.
then the golden glow makes a shy approach, the colors get warmer as the sun gets lower and lower.
as I come closer to the Tanzanian border around 6h15pm, the glow sets in for sure. This is going to be a great moment!
I must have taken 60 or more pictures, swapping lenses, equivalent 50 and 180mm in 24x36 format, to vary composures between changing lights and clouds.
similar picture as above but different clouds: in the shade or in the sun, blue or orange!
at some point I had to go down through the clouds for landing, unfortunately. For a few seconds, that purple or pink tone showed up to finish the scene…
last view at 6h25, the sunset is at 6h31 these days.
well sad…that’s why I said ‘photography’ in the title. No way to compare this to what happens in Iran for instance!
after Polaroid last year, another film is dead: the famous Kodachrome… it was the first color film ever. It came out in 1935. It is still the color film mostly used in archives. National Geographic switched to color thanks to this film. I hardly used that film because it was expensive when I started photography. And it was not convenient at all to use here. Now I wish I had made the effort there too. For those who are interested visit Kodachrome Project. Or http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=15398&pq-locale=en_GB&_requestid=763, OK it’s an awful address but just click on it for 43 nice Kodachrome pictures from the past.
I’m a bit upset with Kodak initially to look for good profit and shut down this film because it represents now only 1% of their film sales. But at the same time Kodak has just released some new films or updates of older films… and thanks a lot to the old Kodak guys who have produced great films, have taken many commercial risks. The Kodachrome would have been 75 years old next year with little change in its specifications! Quite a feat.
Karine is busy with her Polaroid cameras (3 so far!) to stay tuned with the golden days of photography, or her twin reflex lens Mamiya C220 amongst various oldies.
as for me, on top of my leica, my old Nikons, my Russians antiques, I’m impatient to receive my Rolleiflex this Thursday! Using good old films in medium format. Our bits to help the film industry. No doubt I’ll post a picture of this beauty soon.
in the meantime, the Mamiya…
a beauty uh? Quite similar to the Rolleiflex.
and 2 pictures shot with this C220. I had to beg Karine to let me use for one film between 2 of her films. That was in Ndutu in dec 08.
nothing special about the pictures but it is quite an exercise! The framing is quite a feat: as opposed to regular cameras, the mechanism is such that the viewfinder offers an inverted image, that is the photographer has to move the opposite direction of what he wants to frame, left instead of right, up instead of down. And even worse to use in a diagonal movement. Sometimes the subject was fed up of waiting and had left. Of course there was first the viewfinder to open up, the focus, the aperture, the shutter speed to sort out, the film to advance and the shutter to arm…
cheetah yawning, looking at food but not tempted, the bastard! We waited for long, in vain.
wildebeests crossing the airstrip, Grumeti, Serengeti.
a Cessna Caravan on a soaked Seronera airstrip, Serengeti
same location, a Twin Otter.
another type of flying, paragliding….getting ready early morning, facing Mt Meru.
in the hills near Arusha, I’m in the middle ready for take off, not for a dance lesson as it might look on this picture.
and I’m flying! Great fun! Except when I landed on a acacia tree…
an “airevac”, the patient is brought to the aircraft on a stretcher. This stretcher is way too big for the aircraft, so the patient has to be transferred inside and be seated. But we had our own tailored stretchers that could fit in the plane. The seats had to be removed so the patient could stay on.
volcanic eruption, volcano Oldoinyo Lengai. In other countries, such an activity would have imposed the area to be closed within 200 miles, that would have included Arusha and all the Serengeti, Ngorongoro. “Competent” authorities were asleep, the regional companies happily kept on flying…and subsequently lost 3 engines as I’ve said earlier. Costs could go up to 350.000$ for a new turbine engine…I certainly didn’t complain as I could shoot wild, got to see incredible spectacles like this day with a 55.000ft or 17km high plume of smoke with an electric thunderstorm inside! Too bad the lightning were too short to be caught on picture. One such show in a lifetime probably.
one of the planes I’ve flown, a Chieftain PA31. Quite a bitch but a good experience. A turbo pipe kept on splitting apart for instance. I had to fix it myself before many take-offs, which was not very difficult. But try to convince passengers that it is normal for the pilot to fiddle in the engine with a Swiss army knife…
Caravan landing in Mahale, lake Tanganyika. A bit unusual to land from the lake as the hills on the other side are too steep for a safe go-around. But if the wind is too strong, no choice but come from the lake.
those hills look like nothing but, trust me, they’re potentially nasty. Quite some dust as the pilot applies heavy braking, including the reverse power.
“escorting” a colleague for landing…Ikuu, katavi nat’l park.
now this is NOT my picture. But the story is interesting. This Russian Antonov 12 had carried some rhinos to a reserve in Tanzania from abroad. Tanzania doesn’t have much of its own original rhinos, unfortunately. Luckily things are moving slowly and South Africa can provide rhinos, at some price though.
nice little flight, all good conditions for decent shots with Mt Kilimanjaro in the back. Big money was saved for that former company as it was the plan to get such a picture anyway. And luckily this double flight took place one day under regular business. Imagine renting a photographer, the costs of 2 aircraft up there for at least one hour since Kili had to be included in the picture… A few thousand $ for sure. Here, all for free, one picture is on their website, I hardly got a thanks and no payment of course…let’s be zen attitude.
the Boeing taking off is Air Force One. I wish I had had a rocket launcher. Oh let me precise, it was before Obama’s time of course. But then, with a launcher in hand, I might have aimed at the first plane too…see just above ;-)
from a notorious company here. Spot the missing bit around the landing gear. While in the air the lower part that covers the wheel retracts under the belly, leaving this gap even bigger. According to one pilot and his handbook, this plane could only fly at slow speed to the next facility for repairs, not on regular flights with passengers on board! Which it did for a while.
a superb vintage Dakota DC 3, designed in ‘35, visiting the Serengeti from South Africa.
landing after a storm in Seronera. I had been the first one to land, jump out of the plane with the camera ready. The shiny parts are wheel tracks
…but the strip is in hardly better condition.
being helped to fix a puncture (puncha in swahili, just read it loud it and you’ll hear the similarity)
flying that lovely Chieftain PA31. One engine stopped, the propeller feathered, the Kilimajaro on the horizon.
same engine with a superb oil leak.
Caravan landing in lake Manyara. Some little hills out there, pilots to be cautious in bad weather.
stupid wildebeest (gnou) crossing in front of us. Cherry on the cake for this image: the hot-air balloon in the background.
a F406 being fixed again after a belly landing. Some pilots or companies are regular with this kind of mishap. Some planes have even crashed twice…and are back in the air.
Serengeti South airstrip,no comment.
Grumeti, a Twin Otter landing, birds in the tree, completely used to it.
2007 and 2008, the volcano Lengai was seriously active with smoke and ashes sometimes up to 50000ft, 15km high. It looked like a Hiroshima mushroom. Here is ash deposit on my aircraft. Often the ash was invisible in the air though. 3 turbine engines died in different companies because of ash intakes. It happened one of these engines agonized on me. Luckily I could finish the flight, but I didn’t like the feeling to see the engine temperature in the red and fly on reduced power…
Seronera in the Serengeti after a storm. Soaked airstrip.
storm on mount Meru.
look at that passenger, we were taking a picture of each other.
a bit of a storm ahead of me…
flying formation with Luca, a flamboyant Italian pilot on a Cessna 404. I was on autopilot so I could shoot pictures easily. I could hear all the passengers laughing and happy. Well, minus one…I just had asked Luca to come to my left side when I got hit on the head from behind!! the only time (and last I hope) in my life. I turned around, still on autopilot, and saw a big wild woman yelling at me. Wild for a 2nd reasons: she was wearing a styling leopard blouse! large beach mop of hair, too much make up. Her eyes were nearly out of sockets. She said that she hated aeroplanes, was dead scared to fly, that I was the most stupid and dangerous pilot she had ever seen blabla….all of that without breathing. Finally she went back to her seat and I told Luca to keep his distances…when he heard the magic word “woman” in my explanations, that serial womanizer thought he could “handle” her, for he was afraid to lose his job. As for me, I had already been given a notice anyway, with poor manners from that company. That’s why I started to fly in shorts for the whole notice period. I would arrive at the airport by bicycle, all dusty and sweaty, just changing the Tshirt for a white shirt and ready to fly… back to Luca, when I described her more in details, he had a second thought about his job and just said with his beautiful Italian accent: “hmm, then forget it, hay?”. The woman still had a go at me after landing, wailing and gesturing. Man, I made an impression on her. She was about to sue me etc. When I said I’d sue her too, making the trial interesting, she finally went quiet, puzzled. Being hit for once was good reason but I made myself clear as well by saying that hitting while flying was probably the most dangerous thing to do in one lifetime. She finally left, mumbling and didn’t take the phone numbers I wanted to give her…I agree i was quite wrong initially, but seriously don’t hit a pilot on duty, OK?
this plane had hit a giraffe on the neck on take off, the wing was ripped off right away. The plane fell on its side within a second, the engine roaring at full power, no matter what the liar of a pilot said, and trashing the 3 blades of the propeller. Nobody was hurt but the poor giraffe. The lodge employees were happy with that extra meat though…
so the 2nd wing was removed, as the tail, all put on a truck and ferried to a facility.
melted battery terminal. No wonder I couldn’t start the engine.
landing in Mahale, lake Tanganyika, people hardly bothered while doing the washing so close.
Kuro airstrip in Tarangire nat’l park.
Arusha airport, a pilot who superbly fucked up his take off on this Cessna F406…he raised the landing gear a bit too early then got slammed down on the runway again but a drop of wind, sliding on a few hundreds meters, nearly hitting the plane you can see behind, stopping a few meters from the fuel station and from another airplane starting his engines with 50 passengers on board. Close call for a disaster. The 2nd plane he crashed that year.
both propellers looked like pieces of abstract art. Now this plane is the same model as the one below. Notice the extended fat belly pod? Well it is full of luggage…and all of it has been scrapped off, pulverized during the crash, destroying everything inside. Happy passengers! Mt Meru in the background.
same exploded engine, left and right side views. Lorne White did a good job by gliding safely to the Ikuu airstrip in the Katavi nat’l park. The passengers, a honeymoon couple, were quite cool or rather really stupid: they asked if it could have been dangerous an aircraft without an engine! I don’t how Lorne managed to stay serious…
when I get a puncture, it is always about a nail or an acacia thorn. Except for that example….pretty worn out right? Well I had asked to change our tyres because they were worn out. The maintenance company, tanzanair, was short of spares so it gave us this one on a friendly loan. I still fail to understand why they gave us tyres that were in worse conditions than the ones to replace…. With friends like this, you don’t need enemies anymore.
Flying Medical Service, the secret for nice airstrips…
the day of the miracle: a strip being cleared up!
up and below, a dusty airstrip, Kiba in the Selous game reserve.
bush fixing…rocks in tyres to be dragged to smoothen the surface
quite an oil leak but manageable. It became expensive to run at some point though: 3 lt of oil every hour. Not to mention the concerned passengers.
variation on the same theme: another leak but not as bad.
Ikuu, Katavi nat’l park, refuelling in the bush. Though we were careful with extra fuel filters, I experienced once an engine failure. Luckily there was an airstrip not too far so I could glide down there without damage. The 3 built-in fuel filters were clogged with dirt.
Ikuu, planes ready for the night. The branches are from acacia trees. the thorns should prevent bloody hyenas to come close and chew the tyre, which they love to do!
I knew something was wrong in the air: the vibrations were really shaking the airplane. A quick inspection revealed this cracked bit on the propeller section. The white spinner or cone had been rotating out of balance and even damaged the blue bit on the nose.
so I removed that spinner and flew like this for a while, not a big deal. The black arc is where the spinner has been rubbing the nose.
shit hole places, not much happens, so an aircraft become an attraction. I loved the registration of that plane, APE, since one the main attractions of that company was the chimpanzee viewing. Some nasty tongues said that the name perfectly described our ways of flying…tsstss.
a Tanzanian Air Force HS748 which had a problem on landing, in lake Manyara.
spare parts like the engines were then removed or salvaged.
sad or funny story, you decide…these are the engines and the wheels of a cargo Boeing 707. That plane had come at night to land in Mwanza, on the shore of lake Victoria. The captain decided to give some extra training to the copilot and perform touch’n’goes, a good night time exercise. After a while, there was a power cut in town. The pilots decide to circle for a while. Sure the emergency airport generator was going to kick in any time right? Well it didn’t! Tanzania, always full of surprises…. By then it was too late for a diversion apparently, the pilots had burnt too much fuel instead of leaving right away. So in pitch black night, no lights, no beacons on the ground…they had to land with the help of the GPS, which are not always meant to be used for that type of flying. Anyway the poor guys missed the runway just by a few dozens meters and landed in the lake. All the crew survived! This was not the end: it was decided after the inquiry to pull the plane out of the lake. Some incompetent contractors were called it. They used cables and trucks in the wrong way and managed to rip apart the plane in 3 bits!
2 Russian Ilyushin 76 in the back.
airstrip nearly flooded, Olaika, northern Serengeti.
this is what happens when lazy people don’t maintain THEIR airstrip, blaming each other, the bad moon or the evil eye, whatever. The blades look like grass cutters.
and the rest of the aircraft is no better…
wet grass, chopped, pulverized by the propeller… it got very sticky and hard to remove.
Olpirikata, one the narrowest strips I know.
Njurlan, Rift Valley. Some high grass again but not too bad.
a bit of a sandy strip wedged between trees, Pininyi, Rift Valley
strip spared by wild fires. i didn’t need the map or the GPS to find it!
elevator damaged by rocks from rough strips.
a friend visiting his chick, my colleague. Now the Masai have a monster in their legends to scare the kids, a mix of a bat and a man who kidnap naughty boys. Imagine when they saw that microlight coming in! No kids to be seen around, within miles. They must have been shit scared, even hiding in burrows I bet.
I think that by now, you start to get the idea on why I love to fly here, right?
flying formation is an exercise I really enjoy…since I was the only pilot on board, I had to fly myself and while taking the pictures, I’d keep some distance. Otherwise we were much closer.
above the vast empty African expanses…the airplane is a great Cessna C206.
this one is a Czech airplane, a Let 410. This plane was flying faster than me, just overtaking me. We wouldn’t be allowed to come that close to each other in the West. Well here neither normally but …
this Let 410 made a belly landing, that is the landing gear was not put down. The pilots, 2 of them, forgot…they must have been picking their nose before landing or what? Since it happened a few times within a year or so, all aircraft involving the same notorious company, the beliefs were that it was a scam to the insurance…specially that they never replaced these aircraft by the same models but by bigger planes…
this idiot running towards me was a self proclaimed ‘chief in charge’ trying to seize my pictures. He couldn’t even tell me his position or job on the airport. The janitor probably… that was my first ‘fuck you’ in Tanzania. And I still own the pictures….
waste of time but how can I refuse a poor smiling kid to pose in the driver’s seat…
this C206 had been delivered to us across the Atlantic Ocean. Extra fuel tank is required for the 16h flight in one go! poor pilots, must be boring and inconvenient. The 500 lt tank is seen here being removed from the inside of the aircraft.
a mini twister called here dust devils. They can be way higher than this one. Harmless but they can rock the airplane and surprise the pilot, me for instance, on take off.
notice the little ravine behind the airstrip. Better be concentrated on landing.
another bush fix: the oleo strut was flat, oil leakage, no more shock absorber. So to keep going without damaging the metal parts, we had put these pieces of rubber on the chrome part to avoid friction. The nose is tilted up for the time being fixed. Once lowered, the chrome part will be hidden.
