South African wildlife

Currently studying for a photography degree, I started with a vague idea of what I wanted to do once I had acquired the degree and what genres of photography interested me most. Now in my second year this has all turned on its head and there are so many aspects of the subject that appeal, I am getting quite confused!!! My aim is to try out as many styles of art as possible so that I can either narrow down my chosen options or decide to be a master of all trades (though the latter may prove too much).

Having spent a period of three months working in South Africa volunteering at an animal sanctuary, I had a wonderful opportunity to photograph animals in semi-wild conditions at the sanctuary and on safari. The locations I photographed in were forest areas where I was able to walk round and also the bush, where I photographed from the jeep or from a hide. All of the animals were free to roam around, in their natural habitat on a large expanse of land. It was as near to photographing in the wild as I was going to get and felt far more satisfying than photographing at a zoo.

The process was really a learning curve as at that time I decided I wanted to photograph solely in manual, not aperture or shutter priority. This proved somewhat a challenge in dark woods with fast moving animals but I persisted. I used a Pentax *ist with a 1:4.5-5.6 80-320mm lens

© Andrea Percival

I liked the silhouetted photographs of the giraffe and the rhino. These were taken in low light conditions and I hope that I captured the beauty of witnessing these magnificent animals in the wild.

I decided to change some of the images from colour to black and white to see if this added anything to them. For some of them it worked, for some it didn’t. When texture was a factor in the image, black and white enhanced it beautifully, for example, the elephants.