Smartphone Safari Photography Tips

You do not need a big camera to bring home wonderful safari memories. Modern smartphones are capable tools, and many of our guests capture their favorite images of the trip on a phone.

Phones do have limits, especially with distant animals. These tips will help you work with your phone's strengths rather than against its weaknesses.

Understand your zoom

Most phones have more than one lens, often including a telephoto lens with optical zoom. Optical zoom keeps quality high. Beyond that, phones use digital zoom, which crops the image and quickly becomes blurry and smudgy.

Learn which zoom levels on your phone are optical before you travel, and stay at or close to them. For distant animals, it is often better to take a wider photo that shows the animal in its landscape than a heavily zoomed, blurry close-up.

Get creative with wider shots

Phones excel at wide scenes. Use this to your advantage with photos that tell a story: a giraffe silhouetted against a sunset, a herd of zebra stretching to the horizon, or the safari vehicle on a dusty track.

Panorama mode is excellent for the Serengeti plains and the Ngorongoro Crater rim. Close encounters at camp, such as an elephant walking past or a bird on a branch nearby, are where phones really shine.

Think about composition as well as subject. Use the gridlines on your camera app to place animals off-center, leave space in front of a moving animal, and get low by shooting from the vehicle window rather than the roof when an animal is close. These small choices make phone photos look far more professional.

Keep it steady

Small phones are easy to shake, especially when zoomed. Rest your elbows on the vehicle frame, hold the phone with both hands, and ask your guide to switch off the engine. A small bean bag or rolled-up jacket on the window ledge works well.

• Tap the screen to focus on the animal, not the background
• Use burst mode for moving subjects
• Lock exposure on bright skies to avoid washed-out shots
• Try night mode around the campfire, holding very still

Try digiscoping and video

Digiscoping means holding your phone lens up to one eyepiece of a pair of binoculars. It takes practice, but it can produce surprisingly good images of distant animals and birds. Small adapters are available that make lining up easier.

Video is another strength of phones. Short clips of lions calling, elephants drinking or a herd thundering past capture sound and movement that photos cannot. Keep clips short and steady.

Power and storage

Game drives are long, and screens drain batteries quickly in bright sun. Bring a charged power bank and a charging cable on every drive. Many safari vehicles have charging points, but do not rely on them. Free up storage before your trip, or set up cloud backup for when you have Wi-Fi at the lodge.

Back up your photos regularly during the trip. Losing a phone on day six is far less painful if your best shots are already saved elsewhere.