Elephants protect their skin from insects by taking mud baths. In this shot from Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, this family of elephants were glistening from the light of a setting sun. In this park, vehicles are restricted to the road; even making tire tracks in the dirt around the water hole, which means going off the road, could get a guide fired from his job. I shot this with film in 2000, and the longest lens I had for my Mamiya RZ 67 was a 500mm lens which, in terms of magnification, was equivalent a 280mm telephoto in the full-frame digital format. This is not very long, so I had to get as close as possible to the action to get frame-filling shots. My settings were unrecorded, but back then I didn't use a meter. I just used my brain, and I can say that my settings -- based on years of experience of assessing light -- were 1/125 and f/5.6 1/2 (back then we used half f/stops instead of 1/3 f/stops like we do now).
0 Comments