Playing with Food

By now you should realise that I am crazy about a little stretch of Africa known as Mana Pools. Not only is it a place of immense beauty and a real sense of wilderness, but the fact that you are allowed to traverse the floodplains on foot at will (and at own risk, I might add) brings a whole new dimension to your safari experience as well as the kinds of photos you can capture.

We spent some time with a trio of elephant bulls one afternoon, during which the oldest one would regularly get up on his hind legs to break off a branch from the highest albida trees around (see more of that behaviour here). The other two would then come closer and feast with him. This photo shows one of the guys snapping the branch after they'd stripped the leaves from it. On the high resolution photo you can see the bark splintering as well. Shooting with a 500mm lens meant that I had to keep enough distance between myself and the big boys to be able to compose the frames properly.

Techs:

Nikon D3s

Nikkor 500mm f4 VR-II

f5.6  |  1/800 SS  |  ISO-2800

Exposure Bias +0.3

CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO DISPLAY AT OPTIMUM RESOLUTION AND SHARPNESS

If you enjoy my posts, feel free to subscribe to the blog, and do leave a comment here...

Morkel Erasmus

The Poser

You'll notice I'm posting more photos locally on my blog...I'm moving more of the stories I share on my Facebook Page here so that traffic to my blog can be increased, and that I have my stuff hosted on my blog rather than a Facebook Page that can be taken away if the powers that be so choose.

This is a baby Chacma Baboon photographed in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. These little guys are photographic gems and always provide fun, interaction and quirky poses like this. This guy was part of a troop which hangs around the Shingwedzi river close to Shingwedzi rest camp. Their whole area has changed due to the recent floods there, so I'm not sure if the troop has moved on. 

Overcast, rainy weather evened out the shadows and created a nice exposure with soft light. You always need to be mindful for great poses with primates, especially ones which can seem anthropomorphic. The smaller the subject, the more important the shooting angle also becomes. I was able to get a decent low perspective here, even though I was shooting from my vehicle parked on the road. 

Techs:

Canon 1000D

Canon 100-400mm L IS USM

f6.3  |  1/500 SS  |  ISO-800

Exposure Bias +0.3 

This photo is Copyrighted © Morkel Erasmus Photography.

You may share this image as presented here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

NB: Click on the photo to display correctly

Morkel Erasmus

Pastel Lion

This young male lion was photographed from an underground bunker hide in the Etosha National Park, Namibia. I got up at the crack of dawn to see two young males approaching the waterhole. I grabbed my cameras and ran to the bunker. What followed was a beautiful sighting in beautiful light! At this point, a few minutes later, one of the young males walked right up to the opening where I was shooting from. 

I was able to capture this frame using a 140mm focal length, and it's pretty much uncropped. In order to get those lovely colours in the sky on the horizon, I needed to blend back a darker exposure of the same RAW file using luminosity masks. I hope you like it!

Techs:

Nikon D800

Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 VR-II @ 140mm

f4.0 | 1/200 SS | ISO-560

Do click on the photo to view it properly.

Morkel Erasmus

Kruger: December 2009 (Part 6)

Okay, so it was starting to drizzle again...

As we got to around the next bend in the road - we were faced with this sight!

We got to spend more than an hour all alone with these wet kitties in the lush green bush as the rain fell softly all around...magic!

Suddenly, presumably hearing something (potential prey?), the whole pride shot up like a bullet from a gun and ran into the bushes. We stuck around for about 15 minutes but couldn't see far enough into the bushes to ascertain which direction they were taking. We moved on...and found this cute Common Duiker.

Our drive would be completed by spending time with some of Kruger's famous big elephant bulls...

The weather was getting even more gloomy as we crossed the Shingwedzi river and headed back to camp for some lazy time...

...to be continued...