Black rhinos are critically endangered, so when you can photograph one it's very special. When I was in Namibia in 2001, I met a wildlife researcher who told me that two black rhinos came to drink at a man-made waterhole in front of our lodge every other night between 8pm and midnight. He had built a blind near the waterhole, so on the night when the rhinos were expected, I waited with a Mamiya RZ 67 medium format film camera, a 500mm lens (equivalent to a 300mm for a digital format full frame camera), and a Metz 60 CT-4 flash. I estimated that the waterhole was about 70 feet away, and that was critical because I had to base my f/stop on the formula GN = distance x f/stop, where GN is the guide number of the flash at a particular ISO, and the flash-subject distance is measured feet. Everything was manual. This was when you had to do photography the old fashioned way . . . you had to think about it! I was shooting 400 ISO Fujichrome Provia film. Because of the inverse square law -- the light fall off due to distance -- I had to push the film in development three full f/stops to 3200. That made the resultant images grainy, but there was no choice. The bigger concern was that the flash might spook the rhinos and make them charge the blind. In the end, they didn't, but you can see that one of the animals interrupted his drinking to look where the burst of light came from. I took just two shots, fearing a violent reaction. This is a south-western black rhinoceros. Several subspecies of black rhino are already extinct. This one is hanging on for dear life.
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