Kruger National Park, Africa
This is an old webpage carried forward to our new site. Please note that some of the information might be out of date and we probably have newer footage.
Kruger National Park
Kruger National Park is a multi-million acre park in northest South Africa. It arguably competes with Yellowstone National Park as the most famous national park in the world. Although a closed system surrounded by fences, and fraught with issues such as poaching, it is a generally self-sustaining healthy ecosystem.
You can see pretty much all of Africa’s iconic species at the park including the African lion, African elephant, zebra, giraffe, wilderbeest, leopard, wild dog, warthog, hyena, jackal, cape buffalo, white and black rhinoceros, hippopotamus, crocodile, vulture, stork, and others. Being a national park the animals are tolerant of cars and people, and in some cases, such as with baboons and monkeys in the campgrounds and picnic areas, the animals can become pests. When there is interesting sighting, such as a lion or leopard kill, you may have plenty of company at the sighting, but being a huge park you will generally have lots of space.
The park has a great network of very affordable rest camps; however, you will want to reserve ahead as they do book full in peak seasons. For a special experience stay at one of the two overnight hides (blinds) in the park. You are allowed to use a torch to see things at night, and even if you don’t see or film anything you are certain to hear some noises from the African bush.
Kruger National Park Stock Footage
Kruger National Park is world famous for its biological diversity. There is no end of things to see and film. However, that is not to say that filming wildlife at the park is easy. The biggest challenge is that you are generally restricted to your vehicle meaning that a ground-based tripod cannot be used. So you will need to come up with an alternative configuration such as a bean bag-tripod head mount. This of course makes the use of long lens difficult because of camera shake. Nevertheless you should bring a long lens as well as some wide angle lens because in some cases that elephant may be right next to the road.
Because Kruger is such a popular park, with photogenic and iconic species such as lion, elephant, giraffe, leopard, rhinoceros, and others, there is plenty of stock footage collected from the park. Nevertheless, it should be on every videographer’s bucket list.