When I saw an image recently, that I’d taken at the Cederberg Traverse last year, in a banner format, it made me think specifically about what got me to the point of taking this picture, and what was happening behind the scenes at the time. 

For some perspective, to get to the point on the Cederberg Traverse route, where you can take pictures of the incredible rock formations below the Wolfberg Arch, you have to hike up around 7km, from the Sandrfit camp, through the Wolfberg Cracks, before the runners come through this area, which means starting in the dark to get ahead of the field. 

I had positioned myself a way from the Wolfberg Arch for a long shot of it in the background, with runners in the foreground or even under the Arch from afar, as the shot I wanted. Most runners had come through, and we were potentially at the end of the field, I decided to run closer to the Arch, and higher up, to get a different perspective if I could. 

What resulted was this pic, along with the same three runners backlit under the arch with the sun flare, in another pic. These were the last images I took at this point, and I really love both of them. I think the first one specifically captures so much of what the Cederberg Traverse is about, being dwarfed by the epic landscape, the toughness of this race, along with that sense of being lost in an amazing wilderness space.

So essentially what this sums up for me, is that you can spend a whole morning taking what you think are the “right” pics, of the “right” landscape, but there is always a little push further, to see what you can get, and sometimes these moments deliver way more than expected. I guess the lesson is to always keep pushing, even till the last shot!