 |
Tanzania Photo Shoot
By Peter Hemming
"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my pajamas I'll never know!"
- Groucho Marx in Animals Crackers
Tanzania has some of the best game parks in East Africa. The greatest concentration of wild animals on the continent can be found at Lake Manyara, the Ngorongoro crater and the famed Serengeti.
Only experienced guides with the proper vehicles are allowed into each park so it's best to hire a guy who caters to the needs of the photographer. If you go with an in-experienced or inattentive guide, you may spend all your time looking for animals rather than photographing them. It is also important that you go with a small group so that when a photo opportunity comes you're not all banging into each other setting up a shot.
Another great reason to hire a guide is that vehicles act as traveling blinds and most animals have become so accustomed to them you can often get unbelievably close to your subject. Traveling on foot is illegal and also unsafe. In 2006, an overzealous Japanese photographer left his vehicle to photograph a sleeping lion! The lion paid no attention as he clicked away, but the three lioness' hiding in the brush did. Need I say more?
Once you enter the wilderness it is lock-and-load. That is, be ready for the first, next and last shot. My technique is to work out of my camera bag with two camera bodies, one connected to a long telephoto lens for those far away subjects and another on a medium tele-zoom lens. These two lenses cover most subjects that I encounter. If I need something wider, I simply dig into my camera bag for the appropriate lens. Everything I need is at-hand.
Opportunistic is the word that best describes this type of photography. This is a world in motion and you have to think on your feet. That lion sitting on a mound watching a herd of Grant's gazelles isn't going to sit there forever, so you have to get the shot while you can. Leopards are skittish, even when approached from afar, so your camera and lens should be ready before the cat bolts.
Straight animal portraits are fine, but if you want great wildlife images, capture your subject while it is active. Try two giraffes interacting with each other until they cross necks, a monkey eating flower petals in a field of morning glories, wildebeests locking horns in a test of strength or a big hippo yawning. Simple behaviors can look remarkable when captured in an image - but it's not all happenstance, it takes focus.
Parking by a hippo pool, people around me snapped picture after picture of these massive animals as they submerged and surfaced - but I was looking for something more. With my eye firmly planted in the eyepiece of my Nikon, I watched and waited. A hippo surfaced, and as I had observed on other occasions wiggled its ears. I tripped the shutter. Instead of the standard hippo portrait I'd seen a million times, my hippo was beating its ears against the surface with flecks of water suspended in mid-air. On another occasion, a herd of zebras rushed past us in Arusha Park. Wanting something different, I focused my lens on a single animal and slowed down the shutter speed. What I got was a surreal image of a running zebra, alive with movement and contrasting stripes of white and black.
Modern digital equipment has opened many possibilities regarding wildlife photography. In the old days, I kept bags of film of various speeds. Today, a few 4GB flash cards hold the entire day's work. The ability to see the image instantly in a camera's monitor helps insure a proper exposure in unsure conditions. If it doesn't come out right, hit the delete button and try again.
Perhaps my favorite wildlife image I captured occurred while driving in the Serengeti at dusk. We came across a sleeping lion in the brush taking in the last light. My companions got progressively darker shots as the sun dipped below the horizon. Thinking quickly, I took a small flash from my bag and connected it to a sync cord and onto my camera's hot shoe. The lion woke and growled at us. The final image showed the light reflected in the lion's eyes. By adding flash the mood of the image changed from a sleepy pussycat to world class predator. See what the right equipment and a little inspiration can do?
Read Peter Hemming's Bio
|
|
|
|
