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Just a few technical notes about the photography. The photos are a mix of things from my iPhone 13 pro max and a Canon 90D. Almost every photo on the canon was taken with a Sigma 150-600mm 5-6.3 Contemporary DG OS HSM Lens. I'll start with the hardware, then talk a bit about post-processing the photos.
The hardware
I purchased the Canon and the Sigma for the trip. The Canon was a replacement for my old Canon T5i "Rebel," which I always found to be a excellent DSLR camera for amateur photography. But it was showing it's age a bit and one of the buttons in back was sticking, so I decided to upgrade to something newer. I took a look at mirrorless cameras but I found I missed the viewfinder, and I didn't want to incur the extra expense of replacing my old lenses (standard 50 mm and 55-250mm EFS lens that are the canon workhorses). I picked the 90D not because it was for advanced amateurs, with a lot more control that the lighter weight T8i, and not because it was easier than the pro level Canon 5D Mark IV, but because it was a relatively new model and thus had the highest resolution (32.5 megapixels). My general plan was to shoot on "Automatic" all the time and let the camera decide the f stop, aperture, shutter speed, etc. The Sigma was a little bit of a compromise; the equivalent canon lens was $2000, and the Sigma was rated by most as almost as good at half the price. It was a compromise as well in that it's a zoom lens; that is, you can adjust the magnification unlike a "prime" lens that is constant. The books say prime lenses take technically better shots but the zoom lens is more flexible ... and I wanted flexibility. And finally, I bought a solid carbon fiber monopole. Most wildlife photography books recommend a tripod as it's more stable, and I did think about it because, while we were doing some walking safaris, I figured on those I'd use the smaller, more standard lenses which were lighter and allowed free-standing photo shooting. But ultimately I decided the monopole would have faster setup time and allow me to shift the camera around faster, and again, I was mostly interested in flexibility. So, let's start with the good. The monopole was a very good choice because, as it turned out, you always wanted the super telephoto lens with you, even on the walking safaris. There were two reasons; one was birds, which are small and skittish and you therefore need some serious magnification, and two because on the walking safaris you stay pretty far away from the animals. I tried free standing shots with the super telephoto and on anything over 400 mm you couldn't hold the camera steady enough not to have significant amounts of blur in the photos despite the sigma's heavy duty image stabilization capabilities. The monopole was good enough to get great shots, was lightweight and portable, and actually worked as a handle to keep the camera from bouncing around while you were walking. The 90D took some great shots and I was perfectly happy with it except for one thing, which was that the "Automatic" setting was terrible and almost always drastically overexposed the photo. More on that in a bit. The Sigma was a great choice, and I sincerely doubt I would have had any significant improvement in the photos with the much higher priced canon lens (but I don't really know, I'm just happy with what I got). And, having watched maybe 45 minutes of 5 hours of instructional videos on the 90D, I chose to shoot raw and jpeg mode, which allowed me to use a number of photos that probably would have been unrecoverable in pure jpeg mode. Along with that, the 256 gig memory card was a lifesaver because those raw photos take a lot of space (and I was taking a lot of photos; about 6000, to be exact). The mistakes. The biggest one was the camera strap. I bought the 90D with a accessory pack, and one of the accessories was a wider, longer, more comfortable camera strap. But it had a heavy metal clamp, and it was bigger and bulkier, and we were severely weight constrained in our luggage (because of the bush planes we would be taking in Botswana). So I opted for the standard camera strap. With the 90D, which is already a heavy camera, and the Sigma, no lightweight itself, the walking safaris would have been a lot easier with the heavier strap. Second mistake was to worry about the non-telephoto lenses for the canon. The iPhone takes perfect shots every time. Anything close enough to shoot with the smaller lenses, I ended up using the iPhone. Really didn't need to bring them at all. Third mistake was not reading enough about wildlife photography and / or practicing with the camera, because the first day I was futzing around a lot to get good shots. As it turned out, the "Automatic" setting on the canon always made terrible choices, so I usually shot in "Manual" mode, which uses standard settings (which you can change but I didn't know enough about the affects so I just left it as is). But as it turns out, for wildlife photography, you pretty much always want to use Aperture Priority, and indeed post-facto that setting seems to consistently take good photos.
Post processing
Post processing on raw files in particular is time consuming. In the old days, there was Microsoft's Digital Pro 10 software that had a "easy" button that almost always adjusted the photo to make it much better (and, if that didn't work, there was a "contrast autofix" that worked the rest of the time). But since I moved to the new desktop and windows 11, it didn't work any more. So I tried four programs for post processing; Adobe Photoshop Elements, Windows Photos with a raw plugin, Canon's Digital Pro Professional 4, and rawTherapee 5.8. I quickly dropped rawTherapee because it wasn't any better than Canon's DPP 4 and I found it a little harder to use. I found it near impossible to get good results out of Adobe (although I'm sure it works if you know enough about it, if I can't figure it out by playing around for 15 minutes I consider it dog meat). That left Windows Photos and Canon's DPP4, and I used them both. Window's Photos had the advantage of being easy and fast. Generally, you opened the photo, straightened and leveled as required, adjusted the brightness, pushed the contrast to the point where you were getting the most detail, and you were done. The downside was that Windows Photos would automatically try to adjust the photo when you opened it... and there was NO WAY TO UNDO IT. Worst, when it made bad choices (maybe 1 in 10 photos), it was hard to undo whatever automatic modifications it had made. DPP 4, on the other hand, was slower and the controls are much more complicated, which might be great if you were a pro and could spend a half an hour futzing with each photo. That's not what I was after. But the big advantage was that it didn't try to adjust the original photo, so you always started from ground zero, and you could always revert to ground zero if you pushed something and didn't get good results. And while there are a zillion things you can tweak, you could find the ones that matter the most (contrast, brightness, and color saturation) fast enough. So I left Windows Photos as the default raw editor so I could double click and edit, and only switch to DPP4 if I couldn't get the results I wanted.
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