Seeing two male lions have a go at each other is an amazing sight!

Yeah yeah I know I said that I am going to try and photograph other subjects rather than lions!  The thing is that I quite like the following sequence of two fully grown male lions having a fight and I also kinda ran out of time in between trying to sort out the aftermath of an office PC crash.  Will get back onto photographing other subjects and post them soon!

Over the weekend we sat watching a pride of 13 lions.  One of the two males, sporting a bruised and injured eye, was obviously very irate with life.  Out of nowhere he got up and charged his brother who was laying very peacefully in between other members of the pride.  The entire episode was over in less than 5 seconds but what a spectacle!  Luckily I already had my camera ready and focused on the male that was with the pride so I aimed, tried to keep up and let the Nikon’s 8 frames per second shutter do it what needs to do.

Amazing scenes and sounds were frightening!  Sometimes we get caught so caught up in the technical side of our images that we forget about content.   For me these images are all content, even if it just as a reminder of a special sighting.  The dappled light made for difficult exposure, the background was ‘busy’ but check how the rest of the pride make way as the two big guys take each other on.  Content!  On the tech side of things I was quite impressed with the tracking and autofocus on my old Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8.  I only shot these 7 frames and they were all acceptable.  Not bad.

Anyway, as I was working through the images in Lightroom I also liked the intensity in the eye of the one male.

This is a seriously zoomed in crop of the second last image but you can get the idea. They eye of the one lion and the blood on the ear of the other leaves no doubt that this was not quite a training exercise.  After the dust settled the one male was licking his wounds in a nearby thicket as the guy who started everything settled in to relax with the rest of the pride.  You can see how the old wound next to his eye was opened up again in the altercation with his brother.

As a follow up, we saw this pride and the two males again yesterday morning and even though they still kept their distance from each other you could see that there was still a little bit of tension.  Interesting times ahead.

See ya tomorrow.

Gerry