Untamed Images Blog

A colorful winter sunset at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse on the San Mateo County coast of California.

Today I installed Lightroom 4 on my desktop computer while taking a break from culling safari pictures. I wanted to make sure the the old image catalog converted without errors so I selected a bunch of image folders, one after another, and spot-checked the images to make sure they were where they belonged. That is when I stumbled upon the image shown above.

Taken in February of 2011, this photograph of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse was one of my first attempts to employ a 10-stop neutral-density filter. A filter of this type, which looks like a piece of opaque black glass, allows only 0.001% of the available light to pass through the lens. This allows the photographer to employ very slow shutter speeds even when the ambient light is relatively bright. Here I set the shutter speed to 20 seconds which allowed a surreal softening blur of the water, and to a lesser extent, to the clouds.

A lion and lioness relax at dawn among the grasses of the Olare Orok Conservancy in Southwestern Kenya.

I am currently working my way through a ridiculous number of images that I took on a recent trip to Africa, but because I am confident that the image of the lion couple shown above will make the final cut, I wanted to share it right away. I have to give a large measure of credit to our expert guide from Kicheche Bush Camp for making this photograph a reality. This particular guide, whose name is Nampaso, understands the needs of the wildlife photographer perhaps better than any guide I have ever worked with in Africa.

We set out one morning a few minutes before dawn and Nampaso immediately began urgently scouting the area near camp for an interesting subject, knowing that I would want to take advantage of the sweet light occurring in the first minutes after sunrise. Within fifteen minutes he had located a pair of lions that we assumed were involved in courtship since they had separated themselves from the rest of their pride. As the sun crept above the horizon, Nampaso positioned the vehicle such that the lions were dramatically backlit. I captured this image of the lions in a quiet moment, but before long they returned to the business of mating, which lions are known to do up to forty times a day!