The elephant isn’t my kind of animal, but here are a couple of tricks I’ve learned along the way…
First of all, I have to confess that the elephant is not my favourite animal. They don’t look very much like us, so anthropomorphic expressions are almost impossible to capture; they spend a lot of time feeding and very little time doing anything else; and they’re so…grey!
All that means that I won’t go out of my way to look for elephants when I’m on a game drive. Close-up portraits aren’t very interesting, and the opportunity for action shots comes round very rarely. So what else can you do?
Dust Bath
The best shot I’ve ever taken is probably the one at the top of this article. I was on a boat trip on the Chobe River in Botswana when I suddenly spotted a big elephant walking along the bank towards us.
I asked the driver to beach the boat, and we waited for the elephant to walk past. When it finally reached us, it was only about 10 yards away and treated us to the most amazing dust bath! I managed to take a burst of around a dozen shots, and this was the best of them.
In hindsight, I was doubly lucky because I wasn’t expecting to have to take any action shots, so I only had my shutter speed set to 1/500 of a second. Fortunately, that was just fast enough to be able to capture the explosion of dust on the elephant’s flank. Phew!
Dust baths don’t come along very often, but they’re a great way to capture action shots of an elephant. Chobe has the highest concentration of elephants in the world, which is a good start, but they’re still not very easy to plan for - unless you’re happy to hang around dusty places for hours in the hope that a herd of elephants will eventually show up!
However, they’re well worth the wait. This particular shot was the Photo of the Day on National Geographic, so I was really chuffed with that.
The most important thing to remember with this kind of shot is your settings. As I say, I took my shot at 1/500 of a second, but you’re probably better off at 1/1000 or even 1/1600 of a second. Yes, you always have the option of the slow pan, but that’s tricky if the elephant is only moving its trunk, and I think this is one occasion when a fast shutter speed does the job just as well.
I set my aperture to f/8 in preparation for this shot as the elephant is a large animal, and I wanted all of it to be in focus. Because of the relatively narrow aperture and the relatively short focal length (85mm), the shot has a much greater depth of field than normal, but I think that works in this case as it’s an ‘environmental portrait’ that places the elephant in the context of its surroundings.
Finally, I should mention that I almost always use back button focus and Auto ISO, and this was no exception. They make life so much easier, so to me it’s a no-brainer unless I’m trying to take a slow pan shot.
Black and White
“I’ll fix it in post.” “It’ll look better in black and white.” Those are a couple of lines that photographers tend to reel off - only half-jokingly! - after they’ve taken a bad shot, but with elephants it’s often possible.
In this particular case, I was shooting the elephant with my 800mm lens, but I was just a bit too close. As a result, one of its tusks was far too close to the edge of the frame for comfort.
I could’ve just rejected the picture and moved on to the next one, but I decided to make a virtue of necessity by cropping it even tighter!
That meant ignoring the rule of thirds (and just about every other rule of composition apart from ‘fill the frame’!), but at least I didn’t need to worry about the offending tusk.
I also decided to convert it into black and white. Elephants are not very colourful, after all, so it gave me the chance to emphasise the wonderful texture of the trunk.
This is what inevitably happens when you convert images to mono: because there is no colour contrast, they eye is naturally drawn to shapes, patterns and textures. In the case of this shot, the trade-off worked in my favour, and it’s now received over 75,000 impressions on Pinterest!
Cute Calves
Calves are the closest elephants ever get to being cute. There’s just something about the contrast between the giant size of the parents and the idiotic playfulness of the miniature versions beside them that is always good for an “Awwwww…!”
That’s especially true if there’s mud around. I took this shot of a baby elephant wallowing in the mud on the same Chobe River boat trip as I mentioned earlier, but I was quite lucky to get it.
Female elephants are very protective of their young, even when you’re just trying to take photographs, so they’ll almost always make sure that they’re in the middle of the herd, sheltered from any imagined ‘danger’.
That means you have to be prepared and able to react quickly. You might only get a brief window of opportunity, so you need to make sure your settings are correct and that you mix up looking through the viewfinder with looking over the viewfinder in order to make sure you don’t miss out.
Your settings will obviously depend on the kind of shot you’re trying to take. If you’re Paul Goldstein, that probably means using an absurdly slow shutter speed, but each to his own. The most important thing is that you have a clear idea of the shot you want to take and have chosen the right settings to match.
(Very) Slow Pan
I’ve blogged about slow pan shots a few times before, so I’ll just focus today on the particular problems with slow panning elephants.
The big issue is the shutter speed. Whether elephants are walking or running, they move relatively slowly compared to other animals, so that means your shutter speed will have to be a lot lower.
I’d start with 1/4 of a second for a walking elephant. That’s a challenge in itself because there are very few people who can hold a camera steady enough to do that under normal circumstances.
Despite all the advances in camera technology, including Image Stabilisation (Canon) and Vibration Reduction (Nikon), it’s still hard to avoid camera shake at such a low shutter speed.
All you can do is ‘control the controllables’, which means making sure you have the right settings well in advance and then focusing on camera technique.
The sun is usually so strong in Africa that it’s hard to set 1/4 of a second as your shutter speed without worrying about ‘running out’ of aperture settings! If you need f/39, but your camera only goes up to f/36, then what are you supposed to do?! Well, you have a few options:
Wait until the sun goes in. This might not be very convenient, but it would gain you at least a couple of stops in terms of the light level.
Use a Neutral Density (ND) filter or polariser. These are the kind of things that are usually packed away somewhere gathering dust, but they come into their own in this situation. A polariser generally reduces the incident light be one stop, but if you still need more than that, you can get ND filters that go all the way up to 10 stops.
Lower your ISO. I generally use Auto ISO for all my wildlife photography, but slow pans are different. The base ISO of my Nikon D850 is 64, but it’s expandable to 32 if I set it manually. For some reason, the Auto ISO doesn’t go down that far, so that means I have to change to Shutter Priority mode, set my shutter speed and the lowest possible ISO and let the camera choose the aperture. (Needless to say, that all takes a bit of time, so it’s impossible to switch seamlessly from portrait shots to slow pans if you’re a Nikon user!)
When it comes to camera technique, all you can do is go back to basics:
Keep your elbows tucked in at your sides for stability and hold the camera with both hands - rather like the tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber!
Take pictures only in the middle portion of the panning arc (after you’ve had time to get used to the motion of the animal but before it starts to face away from you).
Try to keep the central focus point in your viewfinder over the eye of the animal (because it’s usually more sensitive than the rest).
Try to turn as smoothly as possible, relying on your torso and big muscle groups rather than your wrists and arms.
If these tips help you can come away with a few good shots of elephants on your next safari, then I’ll be very happy.
Good luck…!
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