The topic this week and last are very similar for me. Last week, I told you that I’d rather be on safari and this week I’m going to tell you that my favourite place is being amongst the elephants in the African bush. I must admit, I don’t really like the concept of a favourite place per se, because it feels like it discounts so many amazing experiences over the years. But, I have often said if I could only limit myself to traveling to one place the rest of my life (and even so far as if I had to choose only one animal to spend the rest of my days with) it would be in Africa amongst the elephants.
There is just something about being in the proximity of elephants, feeling their rumbles, listening to their calls, watching them interact and go about their days that fills me with such peace and joy.
I hope you enjoy my selection of images this week.
Elephants playing in the Boteti River in Botswana.A large bull elephant at Nxai Pan in Botswana.A pair of bull elephants at a small waterhole on Phinda Game Reserve in South Africa.An elephant family drinking at a broken water pipe on Londolozi in South Africa.Pushing on the tree to shake down fruits in the Okavango Delta.Part of a larger herd that I spent time with one morning on Phinda Game Reserve.A desert adapted elephant seen near the Skeleton Coast in Namibia.
I had a completely different image ready to go, but something about it just wasn’t sitting right with me. So I started scrolling through my photo catalogue, and came across the series of images I took of a pride of lions that had treed a leopard, seen during my safari in 2015. That sparked my creativity in a whole new direction.
I wish I would have thought of creating a composite image like this when I was originally editing the series and creating a blog post about it. I think this image captures the essence of the sighting in a way the individual images were unable to. If you didn’t catch the story of the lions versus a leopard the first time around, you can fid it here. There was definitely a lot going on that morning!
I hope you enjoy this last instalment of my multiple exposure project. Next month, on to something new.
There’s a simple answer to the question posed in this week’s photo challenge “Where would you rather be?”.
I’d rather be on safari!
I’d rather be watching the sun set over the bush with a glass of wine in hand, and great company to have a chat with.I’d rather be watching the birds from the shade of a lodge veranda.I’d rather be looking out at the vast expanse of the universe, listening to the sounds of the bush at night.I’d rather be taking the opportunity to discover new cultures.I’d rather be out learning and experiencing different ways of life.I’d rather be looking at this view over lunch, than working away on my computer. I’d rather be dealing with this type of traffic while out for a drive.And of course, I’d much rather be hanging around with elephants.
The photo challenge topic of the week is story. So, much like my wordless Wednesday posts, it’s images that tell there own story without having to get all wordy.
Happy Monday everyone! To start the week, I thought I’d share a group of mangy lion cubs, spotted near Ngala Camp last year. This was an excellent lion sighting; during the time we spent with them, we saw lots of interaction amongst the cubs and between the cubs and their moms and aunties. The pride males paid the group a brief visit, and we even had the opportunity to watch the little ones suckle and take trips to drink out of a deep puddle. There are a lot of times that you find lions in the daytime (or anytime really) and they do nothing but lay around like lumps, so it was wonderful to have so much going on during this sighting.
A group of lion cubs, under the watchful eyes of one of the pride females. Ngala Camp, May 2017.
This might be an odd take on the topic of the week, a face in the crowd, but the purpose of the topic was to using different angles and orientations, shadow and silhouette to mask some of the features of the subject.
Portraits aren’t my thing, so I have decided to share a silhouette image.
While I could have zoomed in on this rhino and created a standard portrait, I thought keeping things wide and showing the rhino in the landscape was far more effective for this scene. Had we been driving fast, we probably would have missed it completely, as most of the time the head was down and the horn wasn’t visible, making it easy to mistake the rhino for a rock (and vice versa).
May there always be rhinos to peacefully graze.
Wishing you an excellent week ahead.
A rhino grazing in the late morning. South Africa, May 2017.
During this month of revisiting old work, I’ve had the opportunity to take many trips down memory lane, remembering amazing moments in nature and the challenging times trying to work out what to do with my camera to make the image that appeared on my LCD match the thought I had in my head.
What this monthly topic has hammered home is that the gear doesn’t matter, its what you are able to do with it. The software used to edit images doesn’t matter, its understanding how to make the tools work for you in the best ways possible. These things get said time and time again, but they really become apparent when you start reviewing a collection of work gathered over time that has been captured and edited with a variety of different resources.
No one looking at my images is going to say “You shot that on this camera body and then you edited it with that software program. There are times when I have been out shooting with more than one camera and once the images have been uploaded to my computer, I don’t know which image was shot with which body, without checking the info panel!
At the end of the day, the only thing that should matter is if the image moves you in some way.
And with that, here are a few images I have reworked this week. I hope you enjoy, and please check back next Sunday to find out what the topic of the month will be for March.
A rhino with her calf seen while doing volunteer work with Wildlife Act in 2014.Not a spectacular picture, but a fun memory for me. I took a day off work and went out shooting for a school project I was working on. It was a fine fall day so I took Spencer with me, and he was overjoyed at having the opportunity to dig in the sand next to the river. October 2013.My first foray into Botswana included viewing elephants in the water from a boat. An amazing experience! April 2013.For my then and now image, I chose this wild dog lounging in the shade, seen while working with Wildlife Act in 2014.Here is the now version of this image. I think I was much better able to highlight the texture of the fur compared to the original edit.
