Hailey Pope describes her experience — and improved technique — during a weeklong wilderness photography course with EcoTraining in South Africa’s Kruger region:

Makuleke is a stunning area of northern Kruger with ample photographic opportunities, and when paired with an EcoTraining instructor that knows where to look and how to go about taking the photo, you get a great photographic course.

I have some photographic experience, so I went into the course to refresh my skills and see how I can improve on my photos. You don’t have to be a beginner to do a course like this. You can see as the week progressed how you’re improving because Andrew, our instructor, was giving us tips that we could use while taking the photos. We would get to a potential photo opportunity and we would discuss the scene and try out various settings and how we could take the photos.

One morning we walked instead of driving, which allowed us to have a different perspective of everything we were taking photos of because we were not on the vehicle. This allowed us to look and photograph the smaller things you would ordinarily miss while on a vehicle.

My favorite part of the course was having debriefs and being able to see the images we had taken and how proud I felt after taking them. Being able to sit at a wildlife sighting without being disturbed by another vehicle is another great thing about being in Makuleke. Overall, the course was a huge success, I enjoyed working with the other people, bouncing ideas with them, and chatting about photographic things.

Check out some of Hailey’s photos from Makuleke here.