Kenyan Safari

Someone has to be Lookout

   Yesterday I showed you some photos of long horned cattle and told you that shooting these animals in their pasture was the same as shooting animals on safari in Africa. 

Afterwards, I looked in my negative files and got out my old shots of an African Safari from the late 90’s. I didn’t work on many of these in my darkroom. They are very contrasty, the animals blend into the landscape, my lens should have been longer, etc, etc. 

With Photoshop and my plug-ins, I can work on the negatives easily and quickly, whereas in the darkroom it would have taken hours to get one print. Never mind, that each mistake meant throwing away enlarging paper that could cost (at that time) a dollar a sheet or more. Here are two of my best shots. One reason is that the animals were not moving…always helps to make it sharp. 

The Safari guides are extremely knowledgeable about the animals and pride themselves on finding the “Big Five” for their tourists. If they do a good job, they are sure to get a big tip and their reputation grows for being a good “hunter”. The ‘Big Five’ are the lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros. 

We had a great guide and saw all of those animals plus the cheetah family in the photo above. They were sitting in the cool of an acacia tree waiting for dinner to come in view. Soon it did in the form of a beautiful gazelle. The cheetahs went into action in a nanosecond and the gazelle didn’t have a chance. Some of the people in the car, seeing that the gazelle’s fate was sealed, wanted to do something to warn the gazelle. But our guide said, no. That would be interfering with nature.

Post Prandial Nap

You can see that the leopard in the above photo has already eaten his lunch. His abdomen is distended and he is sleeping soundly. I think of him as Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. 

When you’re on safari, you are driven in a 4×4 or a modified van with an open roof so you can stand to take a clear shot. We had 4 people in our van plus the guide and driver. I enjoyed the safari with one stipulation. There was a rather big man in our car who would block my view. He would stand first, preventing me from getting out of my seat and all I’d see would be a wide expanse of khaki covered butt. To make matters worse, he had run out of film and he expected me to share my film. If he hadn’t been my husband, I’d have really been angry.