Shooting wildlife in a national park means making fast decisions about exposure, composition, and focus while the subject moves, light changes, and opportunities close in seconds. Malawi's Liwonde National Park, with its mix of woodland and open terrain, puts every one of those decisions under pressure.
Coming to you from C4 Photo Safaris, this immersive video follows Danielle through a full game drive where she narrates her settings and thinking in real time, sighting by sighting. She opens on a backlit impala in pre-dawn grass, working at ISO 4,000 and a 1/250th s shutter speed, adjusting exposure compensation live to make the glowing grass read without blowing out. The question she's wrestling with isn't just technical. It's whether a tighter frame emphasizing the grass or a wider environmental shot tells the better story, and she walks through exactly why she lands where she does. From there, the drive turns to a close-up elephant encounter where she's shooting at f/7.1 on her lens's lowest aperture, deliberately hunting that amber eye color that only shows when elephants aren't squinting against harsh light.
One of the more practical moments comes during a buffalo sighting in woodland, where she's using a Sony a7 series body with an Atomos monitor attached, which makes switching to verticals awkward but not impossible. Danielle points out that symmetrical subjects like a buffalo staring straight at the camera actually justify center framing, something most wildlife advice argues against. She also catches Oxpeckers on the buffalo and bumps her shutter speed specifically to freeze the head-shaking behavior that usually comes with them. The baboon section is worth watching closely: she finds a rim-lit subject against deep shade and experiments live between underexposing for a silhouette effect and lifting exposure to recover the eyes, explaining how either direction can work depending on what you want the final image to feel like.
The harsh-light buffalo sequence near the end is where things get genuinely useful for anyone who's ever felt like a midday shoot was a write-off. Danielle is shooting in strong, unflattering light but leans into contrast deliberately, overexposing a dark buffalo against bright grass and flagging it mentally as a black-and-white conversion. She also catches herself watching ISO creep up as she overexposes in manual auto ISO mode, a trap that's easy to miss when you're focused on the subject. ISO 2,500 in full sun isn't where most people expect to land, but it makes sense once she breaks down the chain of decisions that got her there. The video covers several more sightings and compositional calls that aren't touched on here, including how she handles focus through dense foliage when tracking fails. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Danielle.
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