Good day folks,
As part of the pledge to myself to be more active over here and struggling to find time for that,
I am sharing an encounter with you that I had with an Elephant a couple of years ago in the Hoanib riverbed in Namibia, while being on a self-drive tour with my wife.
We were driving down the dry riverbed and enjoying the beautiful scenery, when we met a desert adapted elephant bull feeding on some branches and walking from tree to tree.
One of the distinct features of these highly adapted animals are their wide feet ( as you can see) which allows for better walking on deep sand.
I hope it is safe and haves a proper and long life.
We got a bit closer then, as you can see in this shot, which i only cropped slightly for composition:
(close up @ 400mm)
after the initial portrait I got even closer on this one:
(taken @ 560mm)
As I was operating with long glass, giving me around 200mm at the wide end, I was so close to the bull that what he did next came a bit as a surprise.
The Elephant changed his position, turned around and tried to reach the branches high up in the tree.
My only option to fit him into the frame was to quickly tilt the camera, resulting in this photo:
I had never seen an Elephant stretching and reaching out like this in person, but I knew the elephants in Mana Pools NP in Zimbabwe are famous for this behaviour.
Caught unprepared by this, I took another close up and then decided to switch lenses.
At this time my biggest fear was that this move was a one-time thing and that I had screwed up this opportunity, but this guy decided to be generous and continued to move around and pose nicely.
So, changing to my 70-200mm lens turned out to be the right thing to do.
I consider myself to be very lucky having seen this pretty rare behaviour and even if I hadn´t gotten any photos, this event would have stayed in my heart.
After chewing those delicious branches for a couple of minutes, the bull was heading down the riverbeds towards our car, so I took a last shot and then gave him some room to walk on.
I hope you enjoyed this rather lenghty post and some of the photos.
If so, stay tuned for more shot taken on our latest trip to Namibia,
until then,
Denis