Now I’m bloody excited! I’m heading out for my first Africa safari in a few hours and going with the amazing Images in Africa folks for what will be a trip of a lifetime. Being all new, I’ve been busy doing my homework trying to learn the new critters I’m hoping to photograph. Knowing your subject is so important to coming back with that memorable photograph. Now the giraffe and elephant, I’ve got them down. It’s the Cape Fox, Lesser Bushbay and African Swamphen or White-backed Mousebird (great, they combine mammal and bird names!) and so many more I’m working on. Jake is there now and today he wrote us saying, “even the dirt birds are great!” so I’m jamming and cramming. Part of this process is creating my file naming architecture. Each night, I will go through my images and edit them, figure out who is who and then with that done, be able to rename, file and back all the images up so when I get back in the office, I just have to move them to the NAS boxes. These are the two books I’m taking with me and relying on. You can see the bird book is a bit page warn already. That homework thing, knowing your subject so you can photograph it … it’s giving me a bit of a headache! Good thing I have a 20hrs flight to get over it.