A while ago I did a post on African icons and which animals stand out as truly African.

Some of the other species that was mentioned as possible icons included giraffe, cheetah and elephant but by looking back at Photo-Africa over the last few weeks it seems that lions still rank up there as some of the most photographed animals in the African bush.  I personally enjoy photographing rhino but during the last while the perfect opportunities have been few and far between.   Lions on the other hand have been plentiful and during this weekend we saw more than 18 lions so I decided I might as well go with it and post more big cat images.  We saw lions feeding, lions playing, lions fighting.  And the best of all we had some pretty amazing light along the way.  Bonus!

The highlight was on Sunday morning when we sat watching a pride of 11 lions on and around a giraffe carcass when one of the two dominant males suddenly took a dislike to something his brother did and bam!  All hell exploded for about 10 seconds as the two male lions had a full go at each other.  Brutal, powerful and unbelievably exciting.  I was able to shoot about 7 frames during this heavyweight fight and will post some of these later this week but for now something a little more subdued.

The best way to watch and photograph lions is to sit and take your time to wait for that magic moment when the right facial expression meets great light.  I took a break from processing the images from last weeks hotel shoot to check through some of my lion images so here are four of the images I got this weekend.

‘Annoying Fly’

This young male was resting off to one side of a giraffe carcass.  One of the flies, of which there were many, kept on buzzing around the youngsters nose which made the cat bite at the air over and over again.  The nice thing about this was that each time the lion lifted his head to snap at the fly he would pause to try and get a fix on the little pest.   These pauses, which lifted the cats head form behind the flowers in the foreground, allowed us to pre focus on the area where the lion would be, check exposure and fire when ready.  Even though he was not in full sunlight it was still very bright out which allowed for a nice even exposure throughout the entire frame with even the little bit of sunshine at the top of the image not really distracting from the subject.  Oh, you can see the fly just off the cat’s nose.

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‘Innocence’

This young cub was resting in an open clearing with his mom and brother late Friday afternoon.  Mom was still out cold but the two youngsters were awake and paying attention to every little thing that moved.  This image shows the cub staring at a crow that just landed off to the side of the small pride.  It was already quite late and there was a very light cloud cover so I set my white balance to cloudy which warmed the image up enough to keep the colors quite intense.  The other option would have been to drop the saturation and go for a black & white image but I quite liked the final result.

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‘Into the Sun’

This was the first image I shot on Sunday morning.  We were following three young lions on their way back to the giraffe carcass after having a drink at a nearby waterhole.  The three youngsters almost never stood still and kept on pouncing on each other.  This particular young male stopped right next to our vehicle and stared at his two siblings as they were play fighting in the grass.  Luckily for us they were staring directly east of us which meant that the young lion was staring directly into the sun.  Meter off the bright fur on the face. Click.

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‘Who’s Next?’

This is one of the males that was involved in the heavyweight fight mentioned before.  The interesting thing is that this was the day before the fight so their little altercation was perhaps not so little.  The big guy just finished feeding on the giraffe carcass and was cleaning himself up in the shade of a large thicket.  The large shady area meant that we did not have to worry about fighting with exposure too much and full frame metering did a pretty good job.   There was a slight reflection from a nearby piece of white rock that bounced just enough light on to the side of the lions face to create a little bit of depth and help the texture in his face to come alive.  Mean looking fellow in between all the pretty little the flowers!

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Not bad for a weekend and as soon as I make some headway on my image processing I will have a few more images to post.  The one thing that is very important in animal portraits is getting the eyes sharp and in focus and in all of these images I was lucky enough to do so, even though the first and third ones were close.  Would be quite keen to find out – which of these is your favorite and why?

I have a load of images to work through and will post one or two of these as I get them done.  Other than that I am going to specifically be looking to shoot something other than lions for a few days – depending of course what the light does!

See ya soon.

Gerry