The King of Beasts
While on safari in Tanzania we travel in modified Toyota Land Cruisers. The rear passenger compartment has been enlarged to accommodate from 7 to 9 passengers depending on the particular modification. For our tours, we limit each vehicle to 3 passengers to allow plenty of space for moving around and getting the pictures you want. In our case, the company we travel with removes the extra seats, giving us ample space to move around.
In Kenya we travel in Toyota vans. Again the extra seats are removed for us.
In both countries the vehicles have pop up roofs allowing us to use the edge of the van to rest our bean bags on for shooting. As such for most of the game drives we are shooting down onto the smaller animals. We shoot straight out to larger animals such as elephants and giraffes.
The drivers monitor a radio, and keep informed as to what other drivers are seeing. They also share what we find. It is considered mandatory to share the information with others. However, when a driver hears of a particularly good sighting they will NOT share that information with the passengers. They are afraid that if they tell us of a sighting and when we get there the animal has already left, we will be disappointed. Better not to tell!
On this particular day (our first in the Masai Mara) we were headed out for our evening drive, meandering along slowly, the driver and whoever is standing in the back (me) scanning the fields and trees, looking for whatever we can find out there when the driver heard something on the radio and suddenly accelerated rather quickly. When I had recovered my footing, I bent and asked, "Mody, WHERE are we headed?" He pointed across a small ravine at two land rovers in the distance. It took us about 15 minutes of driving before we reached the sighting. And this is what we found:
Lucky for us this fellow and his entire family were resting on a "kopje" - a rock hill- that put him slightly above us. To date this has been the best lion sighting I have ever had the good luck to be able to see. For me this is right out of national geographic and I can only hope to get another opportunity like this again. The male was probably about 10 -15 meters away from us.
I hope Harry is not going to be offended by this kitty!
Enjoy the picture.
Don
In Kenya we travel in Toyota vans. Again the extra seats are removed for us.
In both countries the vehicles have pop up roofs allowing us to use the edge of the van to rest our bean bags on for shooting. As such for most of the game drives we are shooting down onto the smaller animals. We shoot straight out to larger animals such as elephants and giraffes.
The drivers monitor a radio, and keep informed as to what other drivers are seeing. They also share what we find. It is considered mandatory to share the information with others. However, when a driver hears of a particularly good sighting they will NOT share that information with the passengers. They are afraid that if they tell us of a sighting and when we get there the animal has already left, we will be disappointed. Better not to tell!
On this particular day (our first in the Masai Mara) we were headed out for our evening drive, meandering along slowly, the driver and whoever is standing in the back (me) scanning the fields and trees, looking for whatever we can find out there when the driver heard something on the radio and suddenly accelerated rather quickly. When I had recovered my footing, I bent and asked, "Mody, WHERE are we headed?" He pointed across a small ravine at two land rovers in the distance. It took us about 15 minutes of driving before we reached the sighting. And this is what we found:
Lucky for us this fellow and his entire family were resting on a "kopje" - a rock hill- that put him slightly above us. To date this has been the best lion sighting I have ever had the good luck to be able to see. For me this is right out of national geographic and I can only hope to get another opportunity like this again. The male was probably about 10 -15 meters away from us.
I hope Harry is not going to be offended by this kitty!
Enjoy the picture.
Don
C&C always welcome. I can't learn if I don't know what I've done wrong or could do better.
http://donbirch.smugmug.com/
http://donbirch.smugmug.com/
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Did you have any more FG room? I'd like to see him sitting higher if possible. Being the picky bugger that I am, I would probably get rid of those bits of vegetation. Maybe you don't like doing things like that?
I don't normally do a lot of tweaking to my photos until I decide which I'm going to print off. If I did choose that one for printing, I probably would clean it up a bit. With PSCS5 that will be a breeze.
Foreground? Like this perhaps? :
http://donbirch.smugmug.com/
Yes...it makes him even more imposing...I think.
When you get this close to these guys, they ARE imposing, no matter what!
http://donbirch.smugmug.com/
Well done!
I think big cats are the scariest creatures on earth.
I like the first lion shot better...you know with CS5 it would be relatively easy to expand that FG a bit. Just expand the canvas with the crop tool and use content aware scale.
Ask and you shall receive
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