The photo challenge topic of the week is story. So, much like my wordless Wednesday posts, it’s images that tell there own story without having to get all wordy.
I hope you enjoy!
Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
The photo challenge topic of the week is story. So, much like my wordless Wednesday posts, it’s images that tell there own story without having to get all wordy.
I hope you enjoy!
Happy Monday everyone! To start the week, I thought I’d share a group of mangy lion cubs, spotted near Ngala Camp last year. This was an excellent lion sighting; during the time we spent with them, we saw lots of interaction amongst the cubs and between the cubs and their moms and aunties. The pride males paid the group a brief visit, and we even had the opportunity to watch the little ones suckle and take trips to drink out of a deep puddle. There are a lot of times that you find lions in the daytime (or anytime really) and they do nothing but lay around like lumps, so it was wonderful to have so much going on during this sighting.
I’m really finding creating these composite images to be a fun project for the month. I’m again digging through my archives to find images that, to me, just work together. This leopard was a fairly young male that I photographed in the Okavango Delta last May, and the sunset image is from a different trip to the delta, in 2015.
I had initially had another vision for this image using two very specific photographs, but they just didn’t want to play nicely together.
I hope you enjoy what I have come up with this week.
The photo challenge topic of the week is out of this world. I’ve chosen to share a stitched panorama image that I shot while exploring the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. We flew to the coast from camp for a day of exploration, and as we were driving through the dunes we came across this beautiful oasis in the middle of vast tracts of featureless sand dunes. It truly was an out of this world landscape to see.
To start the week, and African Wild Dog at the start of a hunt. We had been spending time with the pack as they lounged in the shade, and quite suddenly they made the decision to set off. They dispersed incredibly quickly, and following them through the tall grass was a losing battle. Thankfully, there were two or three more opportunities to spend with the pack during this particular stay in the delta.
This first multiple exposure image of the month is an idea that I jotted down in more than one place over several months, so I am finally glad to have a chance to explore it and create something.
I created this image utilizing photoshop, using some basic layer masks and adjusting the blend mode to suit. It really is that simple but that are lots of step by step tutorials available if anyone is interested in researching it further.
The lion image that is a basis for the composite was shot in Etosha National Park in Namibia in April 2017. This young male lion slunk across the road in full stalk position towards a herd of zebra, but as they had spotted him before he even started moving, it really was a wasted effort. The orientation of the zebra pictures I had from that same time period weren’t quite right for what I was looking to do, so I found one in my catalogue taken in the Okavango Delta in 2015 that worked much better. The positioning of the group of zebra and tsessebe give the impression that they were watching something in the distance… perhaps even a predator moving through.
This might be an odd take on the topic of the week, a face in the crowd, but the purpose of the topic was to using different angles and orientations, shadow and silhouette to mask some of the features of the subject.
Portraits aren’t my thing, so I have decided to share a silhouette image.
Let me know what you think 🙂
While I could have zoomed in on this rhino and created a standard portrait, I thought keeping things wide and showing the rhino in the landscape was far more effective for this scene. Had we been driving fast, we probably would have missed it completely, as most of the time the head was down and the horn wasn’t visible, making it easy to mistake the rhino for a rock (and vice versa).
May there always be rhinos to peacefully graze.
Wishing you an excellent week ahead.
During this month of revisiting old work, I’ve had the opportunity to take many trips down memory lane, remembering amazing moments in nature and the challenging times trying to work out what to do with my camera to make the image that appeared on my LCD match the thought I had in my head.
What this monthly topic has hammered home is that the gear doesn’t matter, its what you are able to do with it. The software used to edit images doesn’t matter, its understanding how to make the tools work for you in the best ways possible. These things get said time and time again, but they really become apparent when you start reviewing a collection of work gathered over time that has been captured and edited with a variety of different resources.
No one looking at my images is going to say “You shot that on this camera body and then you edited it with that software program. There are times when I have been out shooting with more than one camera and once the images have been uploaded to my computer, I don’t know which image was shot with which body, without checking the info panel!
At the end of the day, the only thing that should matter is if the image moves you in some way.
And with that, here are a few images I have reworked this week. I hope you enjoy, and please check back next Sunday to find out what the topic of the month will be for March.