Namibia Photo Tour: Our visit to the abandoned ghost town of Kolmanskop

Yesterday, we woke up and made our way to the private airport in the city of Windhoek. We had all pre-packed our luggage and given our suitcases to the drivers who were driving all that heavy cargo to our next stop. There was no space in the plane and no way it could handle the additional weight.

While our luggage was making the long 10 hour drive to us, we were lucky enough to make the one hour and 20 minute flight from Winhoek to the small town of Lüderitz.

The flight over the Namibian terrain was so beautiful. Even though our luggage was being driven, we all had our camera gear on the plane with us and made the most of it, constantly shooting out the windows.

There is a lot of sand in this country.

Once we landed, we checked into our hotel and got ready for an afternoon of photographing at the abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop.

We arrived at the old mining town and before everyone entered the area and spread out to shoot, I had everyone follow me over to the right of the entrance. I saw these beautiful lines in the nearby sand dunes and thought that it would make a really unique photo in this location. The afternoon sun was casting perfect shadows in the wind-blown sand. We had to take full advantage of that!

After shooting by the entrance for 15 minutes, we made our way into the abandoned buildings. It was really fun to walk around looking at all the sand filled buildings. I took most of the photos with my Canon 5D Mark IV and Canon 24-105mm lens.

This location was the perfect place for me to teach our guests about the benefit of exposure compensation, and how darkening a scene can show off the highlights. I took this photo in the hospital building and loved the way the light cut in from a nearby open door.

It was late in the afternoon and I saw my shadow on the wall of a nearby building. Time for a selfie of me with my ThinkTank backpack on. (The funny thing is...after looking at this photo, I realized that my backpack was way too low on my back. That is now fixed.)

We all had a great time walking through one building after another trying to find interesting photos. I loved this old bathtub that was abandoned here.

We had been photographing for a couple of hours and were about ready to head back to the hotel for the evening. As I was making my out of this building when I saw this room almost completely filled with sand. I switched to my Canon 1D X Mark II camera and the Canon 16-35mm lens. I leaned down since their was not much headroom left, and took this shot. I love the room and all the colors that surrounded me

This morning, we all woke up before sunrise to head back for another shoot at the mining town. Since we were photographing at a totally different time of day, it was fun to see the difference in light. This photo was taken just prior to sunrise. The lines in the sand were not as defined, but this time we had the pink and blue colors in the sky behind the buildings.

This last shot was taken about 30 minutes after sunrise and I was surprised to see so much color coming off the wall of the room. My eye did not pick this up, but the camera sure did.

After we were done shooting at Kolmanskop for the seconds time, we chartered a boat to take us out to a nearby island to photograph the local penguins. More on that in the next blog...

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