I photographed these elephants sparing in the Masai Mara in Kenya. I was using film at the time, and my medium format camera, the Mamiya RZ 67, had a top-end shutter speed of 1/400th of a second. That made it challenging to get sharp action pictures, but I got lucky in this case. In the 80's and 90's, for all wildlife photography I used Fujichrome Provia 100 because it was one stop faster than Fujichrome Velvia, which was 50 ISO. I never dreamt that sometime in the future I'd be shooting with 1600 ISO and higher and still have great quality. I remember using a 350mm telephoto for this image. It was equivalent to about a 180mm lens in the full frame digital format. The focus, film advance, and exposure settings were all done manually, and this made wildlife photography quite challenging. My rationale for sticking with this format was that even though I missed a lot of shots, when I captured something well it would out compete other images in a stock photo agency because the large transparencies (6x7cm or 2 1/4 x 2 3/4) reproduced sharper.
0 Comments