Challenging festival photography

I have photographed many festivals, and most of them are challenging to say the least. This elephant festival in Jaipur, India was at the top of the list for extremely difficult photographic situations. Other photographers and videographers were bad enough, but the biggest problem were the endless numbers of people wanting to do selfies in front of the elephants. I have no words for how frustrating, and angering, that is. These people weren't interested in photographing the elephants themselves; they only wanted a picture of themselves to show they were actually at the festival. To get this picture, I had to maneuver through the hordes of selfie-morons, be endlessly patient, and use Photoshop extensively to eliminate unwanted people from the shot. If it weren't for Photoshop, the only pictures I could have taken were tight closeups of the designs on the elephants. Using a wide angle lens, like I did here, was the hardest thing to do. I had to be two or three feet from the elephant to eliminate the dense crowd waiting for their chance to take a Facebook-bound selfie. My settings for this were 1/250, f/14, 250 ISO, and I used a 24-105mm lens set to 24mm.