Savannahwoodland

The Lowveld in summer mist. This kind of landscape is generally called ‘savannah woodland’ as far as I know. It’s not the open savannah grassland you find in much of East Africa. Beautiful bushveld trees are everywhere - making up in perfection of form what they lack in height and girth. I see the potential to reverse the annihilation of natural spaces like this, done in the 19th and 20th centuries, as the population peaks this century and agriculture becomes denser and more efficient - allowing more and more land to be released back into a natural state. This is the flip side to the ecological doom that looms ahead. At this point we could go either way. If the people with the money decide, we know it will only go one way.

The savannah woodland in the morning - also the world’s largest land animal. I experimented a bit today using my Fujifilm XE1 and the fast manual focus 50mm f1.2. On full frame that’s a 75mm focal length and roughly an f1.8 aperture in terms of depth of field wide open. I was trying to go for a bit of an old-fashioned look like if you were in the bush in the ’60s with a Pentax Spotmatic with a Takumar 85mm f1.8.