Tomorrow I will be off to South Africa - another conference, this time in Johannesburg, and a few days added to go on safari!
Wildlife photography is not an easy discipline. The equipment is more important than for most other disciplines, except maybe sports. Otherwise results will be blurred or boring. Long lenses with low light capabillity are required - meaning heavy weights -, because most animals are active and best observed in low light in the early morning or at dusk. This also means very heavy hand luggage on flights and the absolute minimum of clothes and other necessities...
One has to know his camera well to be able to switch quickly e.g. from continuous auto focus to follow some animal on the ground to 3d tracking to capture a flying vulture overhead. Manual focusing is sometimes necessary, because nobody wants to see tack sharp grass leaves and the leopard's eyes just behind out of focus :)...
And then - the excitement during the action! A hunting group of cheetah or a pride of lions greeting each other rambunctiously close to the safari vehicle, makes one sometimes forget to look through the viewfinder. Watching wild life in action can be so breathtaking, that one ignores all about the camera as not to miss action that is happening outside of the viewfinder. It is wise to keep one eye off the camera for the surroundings - maybe a jackal will try to sneak in and get bits of the dead gnu that the lion pride is munching on - if one concentrates too much on getting the bloody noses of the lions right, one might miss the moment when the jackal shows up out of hiding and makes one of the lions take a huge leap to chase him away. Nearly always we have to decide and make compromises - will this next photo be a blown-up print for sale (low ISO required) or will it be for the blog or website or a photo essay where we need to capture all sorts of pictures in between to tell a story, where some pixel noise is of no importance.
Sometimes they pose like this leopard lady, who was hiding her kid in the bushes and taking a sunbath watched by several cars and cameras.
...and in these situations we have all the time in the world or until fellow safari goers in the vehicle run out of patience with the lonely family photographer in the front row, who is waiting for an eye to open ...
or they cannot stand the stench ...
As always, for good results one needs a lot of practise and a bit of luck. But as most of us cannot spend their whole life on safari, a really good picture is not easy to come by.
More here ....
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