When on safari, overcast conditions extends the time when you can still take good pictures. If the sky is clear, sunrise and sunset lighting will be great, but 45 minutes to one hour after sunrise and before sunset means contrast is too harsh. I photographed these juvenile elephants sparing in the Masai Mara National Park in Kenya in the mid-90's with my medium format film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67. The fastest shutter speed on that camera was 1/400, and the ISO I typically used was 100 with Fujicrhome Provia transparency film. In the diminished light of a cloudy sky, that was a challenge. Fast moving subjects like birds in flight, running cheetahs, etc. was impossible for me to capture with sharpness. These elephants, though, didn't move much so it was easy to get a sharp picture. Despite the titanic physical force between the two elephants, the movements were fairly slow. My settings, as I remember them (I used to shoot without a meter based on the light), were 1/250, f/5.6, 100 ISO, and I used a 250mm telephoto lens. The transparency was scanned by an Imacon scanner.
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