My photo tour to South Africa was made on the cusp of the rainy season. There are pros and cons to this. The biggest advantage is that the skies are often cloudy, and that means more hours of photography. In the dry season, the sun becomes very harsh about an hour after sunrise and stays that way until an hour or hour and a half before sunset. Good nature photography in contrasty light is, for the most part, impossible. In the dry season, though, water is scarce and the animals have to drink. They therefore are easy to attract to manmade water holes. The lighting I had when my group came upon the mother and baby rhinoceros was mostly diffused but with a soft highlight on the animals' heads. I like this kind of illumination a lot. In choosing camera settings, the main thing I had to pay attention to was depth of field. The baby had to be close enough to the mother so the f/8 aperture would render both of them sharp. My other settings were 1/1250 and 2000 ISO. I took this with a 100-500mm Canon lens set to 480mm.
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