Africa Wild

Sun Apr 15, 2012

In a studio setup with human subjects that are tame and listenand accessible a lens in the 50mm to 135 mm is perfect. however unless you are doing portraits of elephants at the roadside lenses of that magnification will let you down.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have 2 young male lions in the road in a very quiet part of Addo. The nearest one was slightly downhill at 20 metres (according to my camera) The pics I took with the 70-200 I viewed on the LCD were not good as they were taken top down from my position. I then changed to the 500 and this changed everything ..The background was nicely blurred and the distance compacted to such an extent that it no longer appeared top down but with a far better impact impression of the subject being at Eye Level. Sure I cut paws off etc but this was Head shot portrait instead..I was also blessed with lovely dappled light early in the morning

Sun Apr 15, 2012

Nice shot Peter, the 500 works well in cases like this.

This 500mm lens is ultra sharp and those 2 micro dots visible just on the left I thought were dust bunnies on my sensor..However I put the image at 100% and they are flies after the blood on his mane..Complete with clear wings, the works...incredible resolving power!!!

Superb capture, Peter, and great to see that you left the natural colours in the image. All too often, some tend to up the saturation levels and/or white balance temperature to bring out a warmer, but often unnatural "pop" to images. Clearly this is not the case in this picture

Thanks GrumpyI actually desaturated by 25%.