I have been away. A month-long work trip across Namibia and South Africa that was extraordinary, exhausting, and brutal in roughly equal measure. Fifty or sixty meetings in four weeks. Twelve or thirteen flights. No days off. The kind of trip that you finish proud of having done and grateful to have come home from.
The Bronica S2A came with me. I carried it pretty much everywhere. It barely got out of the bag for most of the trip because there was no time. But I got two rolls shot in Namibia on a single long road-trip day, and that day is the subject of this article.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series: the Namibian leg of the trip. Part 2 covers the South African leg with the same camera plus a Zeiss Ikon Nettar, and that one has the more dramatic photographs. But this one has the more dramatic landscape, and Namibia deserves its own article.
If you have never been to Namibia and have any opportunity to go, go. There are very few places left on Earth where the landscape is so vast, so empty, and so visually overwhelming that it changes how you think about scale.
The trip in context
I want to be honest about why the photography output is small.
This was a work trip, not a photography trip. I was in southern Africa for meetings, not for landscapes. The photography happened in the gaps between flights, during long road transfers between cities, when there was an hour or two of unstructured time to actually use a camera.
Most days had no opportunity at all. I would be in a meeting room from breakfast until late evening, with nothing visible from the windows but office buildings. The Bronica sat in my bag, weighing me down, not earning its keep.
The two days that did produce photographs were both long road transfers: a day driving from Windhoek to Solitaire in Namibia (this article) and a similar long-drive day in South Africa (Part 2). On road days, with a driver and a camera and a willing pair of eyes, the photography is possible. Just barely.
If you do work trips with a film camera, plan for the transfer days, not the meeting days. That is the only way the camera earns its weight.
Windhoek to Solitaire
The drive from Windhoek (Namibia’s capital, in the central highlands) to Solitaire (a tiny settlement in the desert) is one of the iconic Namibian routes. About 220km, three to four hours’ driving on a mix of tarmac and gravel, with a dramatic mountain pass somewhere in the middle and some of the most distinctive desert landscape on the continent waiting at the end.
My driver was Alpha, who was patient, knowledgeable, willing to stop whenever I asked, and a hero throughout the day. If you do this route, get a driver who knows it. The gravel roads are demanding and the landmarks are not always obvious to someone unfamiliar with the area.
Departure: just after 7:45 AM. Sun pretty much just up. The light at that hour in Namibia is extraordinary. Low, golden, raking across the landscape and picking out every texture and shadow.
The kit choices
Camera: Bronica S2A with the 50mm Nikkor wide-angle lens. I only had the 50mm with me. This was a small mistake which I will come back to. The 75mm or 150mm would have been useful for the long-distance compressed landscapes the route presents, but I was travelling light and the 50mm was what I had room for.
Film: started with Kodak Gold 200 for the colour rendition of the early morning desert light, then switched to Ilford FP4 Plus for the more graphic black-and-white work later in the day at the mountain pass.
Other kit: a small light meter (the Reveni Labs spot meter), a couple of spare rolls in each format, and a notebook. No tripod because of luggage weight constraints. Everything handheld, which works for daytime desert shooting on 200 ISO film with bright sun overhead.
Onto the gravel
The first hour was tarmac out of Windhoek, then we turned off and the gravel began. From this point on, the road becomes its own subject. Gravel roads cutting through endless flat desert with mountains visible in every direction, no other vehicles, no settlements, no obvious sign that anyone lives here at all.
The 50mm felt wrong almost immediately. The landscape is so vast that even a wide lens captures only a slice. I had been hoping for layered landscape compositions (foreground rocks, middle-distance plains, mountains in the far distance) but with only the 50mm available, I was either too close or too far from each subject. Lesson noted for any future Namibia trip: bring at least three focal lengths.
We found a decent first spot to stop. A bit dusty, as Namibia is just dusty everywhere by default, but with the kind of long flat foreground and dramatic mountain backdrop that makes the landscape worth photographing.
I made a frame on the Kodak Gold. Stopped down to f/16 at 1/250th, which the conditions easily allowed, focused at the hyperfocal distance for that aperture and lens, exposed.
The colour rendering on the developed roll later showed the Kodak Gold 200 was struggling slightly. More on this below. But the composition held up.
![PLACEHOLDER: a Bronica S2A frame from the early stretch of the Namibian gravel road, showing the vast flat desert with mountains in the distance]
The sociable weaver nests
A specifically Namibian thing.
You see them all along the side of the road: enormous structures, several feet across, sitting in the branches of acacia trees or on telephone poles. From a distance they look like haystacks improbably suspended in the air. From closer, you can see they are made of woven sticks and grass, with dozens of small entrance holes visible on the underside.
These are sociable weaver nests (Philetairus socius), the communal homes of small sparrow-sized birds endemic to southern Africa. They are the largest structures built by any bird in the world, weighing up to a tonne and housing up to 500 birds, with nests sometimes occupied continuously for over a hundred years.
Each pair of birds has its own chamber within the nest, with a 10-inch-long passageway entrance lined with spiky straws to deter snakes. The whole structure acts as climate control, maintaining moderate temperatures inside even when the desert outside is at extreme heat or cold.
For a film photographer driving through Namibia, the weaver nests are an irresistible subject. They are visually striking, completely unique to this part of the world, and they offer the kind of natural symmetry and texture that medium format film captures beautifully.
I made several frames of weaver nests, trying different compositions. One frame had a fence behind it which I would have removed in a different shoot but could not avoid here. Another was cleaner: just the nest in its tree against the blue sky, with the Bronica’s 6x6 frame letting me compose the nest centrally.
Pushed the shutter speed up to 1/500th and opened to f/5.6 for one of these frames to try to get shallow depth of field. The Bronica’s mirror slap means handheld shooting at slower speeds is risky, but 1/500th is well above the threshold where camera shake becomes an issue.
![PLACEHOLDER: a sociable weaver nest in an acacia tree on the Namibian roadside, captured with the 50mm Nikkor]
The Spreetshoogte Pass
The dramatic moment of the drive.
The route from Windhoek to Solitaire involves crossing the Great Escarpment, the geological boundary between the central Namibian highland plateau and the lowland Namib Desert. The escarpment drops roughly 2,000 metres, and the road across it is one of several dramatic mountain passes.
The pass we used was the Spreetshoogte Pass, the steepest pass in Namibia. It drops 1,000 metres in just 4 kilometres, with switchbacks and gradients that require low gears and careful driving. From the top, the view across the desert is genuinely breathtaking. Vast flat plains stretching to the horizon, distant mountains in silhouette, the kind of landscape that makes you feel small in a useful way.
Alpha pulled the car over at the top so I could photograph. This is the kind of stop you need a willing driver for because few people will spontaneously suggest “let’s pull over and let you spend twenty minutes setting up a medium format camera.”
At the top of the pass, I made several frames on the 50mm. The Kodak Gold roll was nearly finished, so I changed to FP4 Plus for the more graphic compositions. Black and white suited the pass better than the colour I had been shooting. The desert landscape is more about light and shadow and texture than about colour, and the mid-grey tones of FP4 captured the layered mountain ridges receding into the distance.
Alpha posed with the camera for one of the frames, giving a thumbs-up against the view. One of my favourite frames of the trip because it captures the human presence in the landscape without being intrusive: a photograph that says “we were here, this is where we were, this is the scale of where we were.”
![PLACEHOLDER: Alpha at the top of the Spreetshoogte Pass, with the Namib Desert stretching out behind him to the horizon]
On the descent
The pass road continues down into the desert, with switchbacks and views around every corner. Alpha drove carefully while I tried to make frames from the car when stops were not possible.
Shooting from a moving car is hard with a medium format film camera. Mirror slap, vibration, focus uncertainty, and the constant problem of timing the shutter as the view changes. I got a couple of usable frames but most were unsharp.
A few frames at the bottom of the pass, looking back up at the road we had just descended, captured the scale of the drop in a way that nothing from the top quite managed. The road snakes up the cliff face in a series of hairpins, which makes a graphic landscape composition when you can frame the whole switchback pattern.
Arriving at Solitaire
Solitaire is a remarkable place. A tiny settlement in the middle of nowhere, sitting at the junction of the C14 and C19 roads in the central Namib. The nearest big towns are Walvis Bay (233 km away) and Windhoek (251 km away). Solitaire exists because it sits at the only practical stopping point between the dunes at Sossusvlei and the coast at Walvis Bay.
Population: under 100. Features: a petrol station (the only one for hundreds of kilometres), McGregor’s Bakery (famous for apple pie), a general store, a small church from 1948, and a few accommodation options. That is the whole town.
People stop in Solitaire because they have to refuel, refresh, or rest. It is the kind of place where every passing traveller becomes a brief part of a small community of strangers, all on their way somewhere else. There is a particular quality to settlements like this (Solitaire on the Namibian C14, Toklat Lodge in Denali, the little petrol stops on the Pan-American Highway through Patagonia) that makes them worth being in for an hour or two even when they would not normally be a destination.
I made a few frames in Solitaire but the work day was advancing and the meetings I was actually there for were coming up the next day. No long lingering. Apple pie at McGregor’s, fuel for the next leg, and onward.
The colour problem
A confession about the developed rolls.
The Kodak Gold 200 frames have colour rendering issues. They look slightly off. The reds are not quite right, the greens have a strange cast, and the overall tonal balance is not what I expected from Gold 200.
The cause was almost certainly my C-41 chemistry. I develop my own colour film at home using a C-41 kit, and the chemistry has a limited working life after mixing. My batch was about six weeks old by the time I developed these rolls. The manufacturer’s recommended working life is around four weeks. I chanced it. I should not have chanced it.
The result: usable frames but with colour shifts that I have not fully corrected in post. You can see hints of the desert’s natural palette but it is not the rich saturation that fresh Gold 200 would have given me.
Lesson for future home C-41 work: when you have shot something irreplaceable, mix fresh chemistry. The cost of a new kit is trivial compared to the cost of fading the only photographs of a once-in-a-lifetime trip. I should have known better.
The FP4 black-and-white rolls came out cleanly because black-and-white chemistry is much more forgiving of age and condition.
What the Bronica did right
A note about the camera.
The Bronica S2A was excellent for this work. Specifically:
The 6x6 frame suits the Namibian landscape in a way that 35mm rectangles do not. The square format works for the vast, layered, open compositions the desert presents.
The 75mm wide-ish 50mm lens (50mm on 6x6 is equivalent to roughly 28mm on 35mm) is appropriate for landscape work. I wish I had brought the 75mm and 150mm too for variety, but the 50mm covered the wide-angle needs adequately.
The build quality survived the dust. Namibian dust gets into everything. The Bronica handled it without complaint and showed no signs of dust ingress after the trip.
The big mechanical satisfaction of the S2A shutter matters in this kind of environment. You hear the shutter clearly in the silence of the desert. It feels real in a way that quieter electronic cameras do not.
No battery anxiety. The S2A is fully mechanical and the only batteries on the trip were in my Reveni Labs meter. No worries about running out of power in a place where you cannot easily charge anything.
What I would do differently
For any future Namibia trip:
1. Multiple focal lengths. 50mm, 75mm, 150mm minimum. The 50mm alone was limiting.
2. Fresh chemistry. Mix a fresh C-41 kit specifically for the trip’s rolls. Do not chance old chemistry on irreplaceable images.
3. More film stocks. I should have brought Portra 400 in addition to Gold 200 for the higher latitude and better colour science. Ilford HP5 Plus in addition to FP4 for low-light flexibility.
4. A small tripod. Even a tabletop or pocket tripod would have helped with the mirror slap problem.
5. More opportunistic stopping. Many frames I wish I had made happened during driving sections where I did not ask Alpha to stop. Ask for stops more often. Drivers are usually happy to oblige.
6. Take more, not less. I was carrying the Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515 as a backup camera but never used it in Namibia. It would have been a good second camera for casual handheld shots while the Bronica was set up on a serious composition. The Nettar gets its real outing in Part 2 of this series.
What’s next: South Africa
I had another road-trip day in South Africa coming up after Namibia, with the same camera plus the Nettar. Better photographs came out of that day, partly because I had learned from the Namibian experience and partly because the South African light and landscape worked better with what I had brought.
Part 2 covers the South African leg and is the more visually rewarding of the two articles. But Namibia is the more spectacular landscape, even if the photography did not fully capture it. If you have to choose between visiting Namibia or South Africa, choose Namibia. South Africa has more accessibility and infrastructure. Namibia has the landscape that will stay with you.
Closing thoughts
Big thanks to Alpha, who was the right driver for the day, patient with my photography stops, knowledgeable about the route, and a genuinely good human being to spend a long drive with. The right driver makes a Namibian road trip work.
If you have been to Namibia yourself or are planning to go, drop me a comment. I would love to hear what your experience was, what worked photographically, and what you would do differently.
The Bronica S2A is the right camera for this kind of trip if you can fit it in your luggage. Heavy, robust, fully mechanical, satisfying to use, and the 6x6 frame suits the landscape. Worth the weight. Worth the dust. Worth the effort to bring it.
Onto South Africa.