Night game drives

The only places in Africa where you can do night game drives are in the private reserves like Sabi Sabi in South Africa.  In the other parks, going out at night is prohibited because it is assumed that anyone out at night is a poacher.  In Kenya, for example, there is a shoot-to-kill policy for poachers, and that means photographers and other tourists dare not venture out after dark.  It's reallly a shame, too, because striking images can be taken at night.  I photographed these two male lions walking down a road around 7:30pm, and they were lit by a spot light from the vehicle.  It was still quite dark for photography, and therefore I had to raise the ISO to 6400.  This is not something I like to do, but I needed a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the movement.  I used 1/250th at f/5.6 which was the largest aperture on the 100-400mm Canon telephoto zoom.  This picture was taken with a focal length of 117mm.  It's better to have too much noise than a blurred picture.  In post-processing, I applied Nik Software's Dfine 2.0 to mitigate the noise.