A bloat of hippos

You can see I had the undivided attention of these hippos as I photographed them from a cliff above a river in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. It was sort of comical. There were many other hippos in the river, and they took turns being completely submerged and then popping up to check their surroundings. My main consideration here was capturing a tight group in one shot and maintaining sufficient depth of field so they were all sharp. I was shooting from quite a distance, and that helped the DOF issue, especially given the fact that my lens was a 500mm. The low angled, early morning sun provided nice sidelighting. That brought out the texture on the animals. In post-processing, I toned down some of the highlights, especially on the eyes, and lightened some of the shadows. My settings were 1/1000, f/11, 800 ISO.