Asili Yetu Afrika (Our African Heritage)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
‘Asili Yetu Afrika’ which simply means ‘Our African Heritage’. The book has a collection of creative images with brief captions of wildlife, Tourism, Culture and Conservation.
David Macharia Mwangi is a Kenyan Based professional photographer with experience of over 15years. Growing up, he admired wildlife images on calendars. When he ventured into photography, he was interested in knowing how such photos were taken. He then realized that this was a very expensive venture and with the limited resources he had, he ventured into other fields of photography including commercial, wedding, corporate and family photography with the hope that someday he would pursue his dreams.
In the year 2007, he had an opportunity to shoot at the Maasai Mara, this gave him a chance to finally follow his dream and take a tour in the park. The park was alive with herds of wild beasts, elephants and unexploited savanna grassland. In the year 2015 he was commissioned by White House to create content for international media with his photography skills during Obama Visit. He managed to invest more equipments and was able to go back to the Maasai Mara. The state of the Mara really saddened him. There were less animals compared with his last visit and it took him miles to get any animals to shoot.
The number of tourists had reduced comparatively. David’s passion for wildlife and photography and his knowledge on the importance of conserving the wild, pushed him to embark on a journey to take the wild back to its roaring days. He started an initiative Versatile Adventures that is guided by four pillars; Wildlife,Tourism, Culture and Environmental Conservation.
He uses his skills as a photographer to preserve every aspect of our existence in relation to the four pillars mentioned above. Under his leadership Versatile Adventures organizes a monthly event dubbed “Photography In The Wild” The event takes place at different parks and reserves where the participants are taught basic photography skills and later taken to the wild to learn a few tricks of capturing beautiful images of the wildlife.
Versatile Adventures partners with different tour companies and the Kenya Wildlife Service to ensure the success of the event and objectives are achieved. The images taken during the photography in the wild are then used in different forums to help create awareness on the importance of conservation and also to raise funds to help run this initiative.
• The images are donated to Kenya Wildlife Service and the hosting park to use for awareness.
• The images are also displayed during ‘Worth More Alive Exhibition’ for sale and their stories captioned to raise awareness to the public on the subject and learn how they can contribute to ensure the depletion of wildlife is curbed.
• Donations of the images are also made to schools and conservation institutions to be used as educational material during school trips and conservation forums.
• Versatile adventures has a coffee table book titled ‘Asili Yetu Afrika’ which simply means ‘Our African Heritage’. The book has a collection of creative images with brief captions of wildlife, Tourism, Culture and Conservation. The funds raised are used for Versatile Adventures projects to create awareness on the importance of conservation through photography, blogging, vloging and printing educational materials for schools
The coffee table book costs $250. The size of the book is 24″x8 with 64 spreads.
Mpesa Paybill No: 565276 Account name: Your Name
Funds from the sale will sponsor deserving students to study Professional Photography, Film making and entrepreneurial skills at Versatile School of Photography & Video