When I started planning on visiting Africa flamingos were one of those birds I had hopes of photographing. All those nature documentaries on Africa that I watched on PBS over the years seemed to feature huge flocks of flamingos and wow what a sight to see in person. As it turned out we did have an opportunity to visit an alkali lake in the rift valley of Ethiopia and while it wasn’t quite the spectacle from the TV shows it was pretty darn impressive.

For some reason the water was very low and we had to walk quite a distance to get to the water’s edge and as we got close the walking got rather challenging. The flamingos were out a few hundred feet from the edge of the water and it quickly became obvious that the shots were going to mostly be fairly distant ones since I didn’t want to leave my boots stuck in the mud.

The lighting was rather unusual with a high haze that wasn’t really sunny but not really overcast either. The effect made the water and the lake look really interesting but wow did it really challenge the auto-focus on my camera. There were hundreds of birds but they seemed to be spread out just enough to where it was all but impossible to get a feeling of just how many there were like the picture I had in my mind.

So, things weren’t exactly like I wanted them so I accepted what we had and clicked away at the amazing beauty that was in front of me and ended up with some shots that I think are really pretty.

www.texastargetbirds.com

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Phoenicopterus roseus