Safety in Numbers
I try to have some variety in the photos I choose for you. After I showed my cheetahs a few months ago, I have been looking for another photo from those animal safari days. When I look at my negatives, I don’t find many worth showing because I had too short a lens. I was using a film camera and my lens zoomed to 300mm. That sounds good enough, but when you are shooting wildlife, I think 400 is the minimum.
I thought this negative was worth working on because there is a rather photogenic acacia tree and a cute little mountain that make the background interesting. There are a few nice little clouds as well. I used a gradient to darken the sky at the top. We used to do that in the darkroom and it took a bit to get it right, but in Photoshop, it is a breeze.
I saw a professional photographer when I was in Kenya. He had his own vehicle and he had parked very near some marabou storks where he stayed until he felt he got the shot he wanted. There were no digital cameras in those days, so he wouldn’t really know until he had his film processed, but he knew he had to get a lot of shots to have the one perfect one.
We still have to take a lot of shots to get the perfect one. Luckily, we can check our LCD screens and see how we can improve our viewpoint, etc.