I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been. - Diane Arbus

It’s important in any field, profession or hobby, that we grow in terms of development within them. In terms of photography, it is quite simple...try something different. I see quite often when hosting photographically inclined guests that once they are comfortable with a certain style of shooting or perhaps a specific mode, they very seldom want to deviate from their tried and tested methods, and that’s fine, but you will find yourself with thousands of essentially the same kind of image. The difference could be as small as using an additional light source, slight composition change, or going wide instead of tight in on the subject. All these things make for diverse images in your repertoire and that’s never a bad thing in my opinion. In this week’s selection of images, there are no real revelations with regards to what I’m talking about here, but there are subtle differences in approach to getting the images, which I will highlight below each one. Please enjoy this installment of wildlife in monochrome...

This image was taken before sunrise early one overcast morning, so it was quite dark and pushing up the ISO level was necessary to get a decent shutter speed, but what I also did was ask a colleague to use their spotlight to create a subtle backlighting effect, which I felt worked very well in this scene.

This bull elephant was a rather imposing figure and in order to give him sufficient space to move past us, we had to position towards the east and in turn, the rising sun. I knew the clouds would give a nice effect against the elephant with the use of a wide-angle lens, but it was always going to be difficult to get the exposures right without the use of a filter so the sky blew out just a little bit, but overall still a nice image.

Too often when photographing animals, people tend to stick to the landscape orientation position and miss out on some brilliant opportunities. On this occasion, this bull elephant was slowly moving directly towards us along this ever-so-slightly windy road and as he got closer, I immediately switched to portrait orientation to fit him in the frame fully and using the road to provide leading lines into the frame as well. It worked out great!

The “Dirty Portrait”. If you’ve been following my photographic journey at all, you will have noticed that I really like this type of image, especially when leopards are the subject of focus. I feel it tells the story more than a clean portrait image. You can actually imagine this amazing predator stealthily moving through the vegetation, concentrating on the pursuit of its prey when looking at this!

There’s nothing amazingly special about this image at all, but it captured an interesting courtship behaviour between a pair of Red-billed Hornbills during an early morning game drive. Sometimes it’s not about taking an award-winning image, but rather just capturing the moment.

There are many reasons why I love this image, even in the sepia conversion. The focus is a dead Leadwood Bushwillow Tree, an absolute favourite of mine, bathed in golden morning light. When in the wild, it’s important to stop from time to time and just take in the beauty of the natural surroundings. It should never be restricted to only animals. Leadwoods are full of character, even when dead and this one lent toward a portrait orientated landscape photograph. The tree is slanting at an angle, spreading out into the frame and the streaks of cloud created some beautiful opposing leading lines from the bottom right third of the frame.

Animal in its environment. This is usually achieved by portraying more of the scene to incorporate the landscape into the image, but here, even though I was quite tight on this beautiful lion, the environment is still included by shooting through a small gap of vegetation and having that vegetation form a natural frame, still giving you an idea that he is wild and free.

Again, from a technical standpoint, not an amazing image. The sky is blown out, there’s a lot of clutter from the leaves in the tree and the branches don’t create any real leading lines in the frame. Does it matter? No. Not to me anyway. It is still a stunning leopard in its environment, relaxing and making use of this tree as her vantage point. This is what people fly halfway across the world to see!

This iconic African Wild Dog was very close to my vehicle and so composition wasn’t very easy in that regard, but the light was beautiful on it and the isolation of the subject, or bokeh/background blur, achieved by having the dog so close makes it a very pleasing image for me.

A bit of cuteness factor never hurts when photographing wildlife, but at night it becomes more difficult to convey these types of images due to the isolating effect of spotlight usage. Luckily for us here, these two cubs were engaging in a bit of play-fighting and thus gave us many opportunities to try different shots with them. I took a few ‘action’ shots, but I really liked this stand-off between the two siblings.