6-Day Tanzania Through the Lens · Northern Circuit Photo Safari

Met at Kilimanjaro International and taken to Arusha Coffee Lodge, where the chalets sit among the coffee rows of a working estate. The evening briefing with your photography guide is a working one: a gear check, a conversation about what you are hoping to come home with, and a walk around the vehicle so you know where the bean bags sit and how the roof opens.

Six days is a compressed trip, so the preparation matters more than usual. Format cards, charge everything, and decide tonight which lens lives on which body. There is not a spare afternoon in this itinerary to work out your setup, from tomorrow morning you are shooting.

A morning drive south to Tarangire and straight into an afternoon session. The park's baobabs and elephant herds are the reason it opens the itinerary, and the day builds toward golden hour along the Tarangire River, when the herds come down to drink and the dust catches the low light.

Tarangire gives you shapes no other park on the circuit can. A thousand-year-old baobab provides scale and a strong silhouette, and the elephant families here are large enough to build a proper composition around. Shoot into the light at the end of the day; the dust does the rest.

A transfer to Manyara airstrip and a scheduled flight straight into the central Serengeti, turning most of a driving day into an hour in the air. You settle into camp and head out on a first afternoon drive focused on the kopjes and on locating the predators you will work tomorrow.

Flying is what makes a six-day photographic trip viable at all. A road transfer would cost you an entire shooting day, and on a short itinerary that is a fifth of your light. The aerial view of the Rift Valley on the way over is worth having a camera on your lap for, too.

A full day in the Seronera Valley, out before dawn and back after sunset, working the resident lion prides, the leopard territories along the watercourses, and the cheetah on the open grass. Depending on the season the migration may be in the area as well. An image review and workshop session follows at the lodge in the evening.

This is the day the whole trip is built around, so it is worth being disciplined. Long lens for the cats, a second body with something wider for the environmental frames, and enough patience to stay with one animal rather than chasing every radio call. The evening workshop is where the day's decisions get examined properly.

You shoot your way out of the Serengeti in the morning, then climb east onto the volcanic highlands of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The afternoon is given over to landscape work, finishing with a sunset session over the caldera from the rim.

After days of long glass and moving animals this is a complete change of discipline. The crater at 2,300 metres gives you depth, scale and weather, cloud spilling over the rim in the late afternoon and 600 metres of drop to the floor. Bring the wide-angle out and think about foreground for the first time all week.

An early descent to the crater floor for a half-day Big Five session, down there while the light is still low and before the vehicles arrive in numbers. Lion, elephant, buffalo and hyena come quickly, flamingos line Lake Magadi, and black rhino are the frame everyone wants. Picnic lunch by the hippo pool, then the drive back to Arusha for your departure.

The crater rewards restraint. There is so much in front of you that the temptation is to shoot everything and go home with a thousand mediocre files. Pick your subject, work the light while it lasts, and let the rest go, which is the same lesson the whole week has been teaching.