Drought/Amboseli Elephants

Guest Blog Post
I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to go to Amboseli National Park in Kenya.  I was invited by a conservation project named Wildlifedirect to do a guest blog post on their site concerning the recent drought in Amboseli.  They also posted some of my photographs as well.

Photograph
This is a classic shot from Amboseli National Park with elephants in the foreground and Mount Kilimanjaro in the background.  We saw a lot of elephants while there.  There is just something majestic about these creatures, and they are so much bigger in person than I imagine them in my head.

This was a very difficult photograph to get, because the top was so light and the bottom so dark.  What I did was expose to get the elephants just right.  Then later in Photoshop, I used the plugin Color Efex Pro by Nik Software to darken the mountain.  They have a filter called “Graduated Neutral Density.”  It did just the trick to darken the mountain and sky and leave the elephants alone.

Kilimanjaro Elephants