Jeff Cable's Blog: 2023

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Photographing lions on safari in Tanzania, Africa

On our recent safari in Tanzania, we were treated to many lion sitings. It is not uncommon to see these majestic cats in the wild, but the real treat was to see them in so many different situations.

One of our first lion sitings occurred when we were in the Ngorongoro crater, but they were pretty far from us and you can not drive off-road in the crater to closer. The same day that we left the crater, we drove to my favorite area of Tanzania, an area called Ndutu. In this area, we can drive off-road. This means that if we see a lion in a tree, we can drive right to the tree to get a nice photo. Within minutes of entering Ndutu we saw this lioness resting up in a tree. Our photo tour guests were really excited to get photos of her as she moved from branch to branch.

Also in Ndutu, we watched as some of the lions stopped for a drink. The one above appears to be pregnant, or possibly just have a very full belly.

Here is another female drinking.

My goal is to get our vehicles in the best position to photograph the wildlife. We saw this one lioness walking in our direction. Our guide quickly moved so that we could get a nice photo of her with sunlight on her and the tall grass in the background.

The same lioness that you saw walking in the previous photo decided to plop down and take a rest very near our vehicle. I wanted to get a photo from a low angle, so I used the reciprocating screen of the Canon R5 (with the Canon RF100-500mm lens mounted to the camera) to lower the camera outside of the vehicle as low to the ground as I could and fire off some shots a couple of feet off the ground.

In the same pride of lions, there was this one male...

The female was not very happy with the male! I was really happy to capture the emotion in the female, but did not expect the male to jump out of the frame. Arghhhh! This would have been so much better if we saw the whole male.

If you have been on safari before, you may know that there is a whole ritual with the mating process. I told all of our guests what to expect and we all had fun capturing the interactions between the male and females. At this particular moment, I think the female startled the male.

And in this shot, I think the second female startled the first female.

They were likely fighting for dominance.

The mating process is always interesting. The entire process happens in about 20 seconds, and it is repeated about every 20 minutes, sometimes for as long as a week. The male lion almost always looks angry and the female typically looks bored. Many times after completion, the female will snap back at the male before turning over on her back. She turns onto her back to help the fertilization process (since the lioness' fallopian tubes are curved).

Towards the end of one of our days, we came across the partial remains of a wildebeest, and heard that a lioness was close by. At one point she popped our of the bushes and I grabbed this photo of her perfectly framed in the brush. I love the way that her golden body is in contrast to the dark background.

She started walking away and our guide made another mad dash for a "straight-on' position. He guessed perfectly and we had a shot of her coming right at us. As she walked towards us, she gave us this big yawn. We loved that!

The following morning we were driving along the waters edge when we spotted this large male lion who was resting by the water. I encouraged our guests to shoot an image of the lion, but to take it wide enough to show all the zebra on high alert in the background. This shows the way that the animals coexist in the wild. (Almost everyone on our trip was using a Canon R5 or Canon R6 with the Canon RF100-500mm lens. This lens is great because, with the same lens, you can shoot tight or wide). They either owned the gear or borrowed it from my contacts at Canon CPS (for free I should add).

Towards the end of our trip, we were driving in the Serengeti when our guide saw these two male brothers hiding under a small tree. We waited for about 20 minutes to see if they would move.

Waiting while on safari is a very good thing. Not only do things change in an instant, but it also gives us a good chance to capture portraits like this one.

Both of the brothers got up and started walking towards the copis (rock outcroppings). Figuring that they were heading towards the rocks, we moved our vehicle to follow their path. I loved this scene, with the big male lion surrounded by the endless tall grass of the Serengeti.

Once the large male made it to the rock area, he turned around to check out our vehicles. I love this shot with the curve of the tail and the interesting background.

Just before walking behind the rocks and mostly out of sight, he turned and looked right at us. Many people ask me if I am ever scared while on safari and the answer is always "no". These big cats, although incredibly powerful and dangerous, do not see us as food. They are accustomed to the safari vehicles and usually use the shade of the vehicle to cool down. Would I get out of the vehicle? No way! But we always feel safe and love getting great photos of these big cats.

By the way, I just added a bunch of new photo tours to my web site. These include future trips to Africa, Greece, Indochina, Costa Rica... You can find those here.

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Saturday, March 4, 2023

Photo retouching - making a good photo much better!

My last blog post was written and posted from London, during a long layover on my way to Africa. We just completed the amazing photo tour in Tanzania and now I am writing this blog post while on another layover, this time in Ethiopia.

After shooting more than 300GB of images in the last 12 days, I have started working on the culling (using Photo Mechanic) and retouching (using Adobe Photoshop). As I was working on this process, I thought that I would show you my finished image and the original, to give you an idea of what I do to complete an image. Regardless with what camera you use, or even the photo retouching software you use, these tips should be helpful to you. At least I hope so!

Let's jump right in.

On one of our slower days on safari, we decided to work on the art of capturing birds in flight. We continually chased the Lilac-breasted rollers, waiting for them to take off, and hoping to grab some nice photos. This shot was taken at 1/5000 sec using the Canon R5 camera with the Canon RF100-500mm lens. The subject tracking is SO GOOD, that it really helped me and our photo tour guests capture some killer images. But, if you see the original below, the image needed cropping, and some adjustments to the white balance, tiny, color saturation and contrast. What a difference this makes!

At one point, one of our vehicles got a flat tire. While our guides were changing the tire, we were surrounded by the local Masai people. This was an awesome time to do portraits of them. I love this photo of a local Masai boy, but there was a rock at the bottom of the frame. Using Photoshop's clone tool, I was able to remove the distraction of the rock and make a better portrait.

One of the things that we look for when photographing the large cats in Africa is the yawns and good facial expressions. The lioness looks ferocious in this photo, but it is simply a yawn. I knew as soon as I took it, that it would make a nice photo, but I needed to crop in and makes subtle changes to the exposure, shadows and highlights to really finish it off. You can see how the tighter crop and other adjustments really brings the photo to life.

This photo was one of the most difficult of the trip. We were parked off to the side of a kill, photographing the vultures as they continually flew down to feed. After taking countless images of the birds in flight, I figured it was time to try something different (and teach our guests some new tricks). I changed my camera settings (from ISO 1000, f/7.1) to ISO 100 with an aperture of f/11. This now gave me a shutter speed of 1/200 sec. I followed the vultures with my lens as they flew down and motion panned them. I captured this photo and loved the motion in the wings with the face being tack sharp. Using the resolution of the Canon R5 camera, I was able to crop in on the photo to highlight the details of the head and the motion everywhere else, with plenty of resolution to spare. Comparing the retouched image to the original, you will see that I also made adjustments to the exposure to brighten the bird and background.

I took this photo this morning, before packing up and heading to the airport. This monkey was just outside my room and screaming for a photo. I was captured by the orange eyes, but needed to make minor adjustments to bring out the eyes. I used Photoshop to select the subject and then increased the exposure and made adjustments to the shadows slider to lessen the dark shadows. These changes were less obvious but still needed to complete the shot.

This last shot is one of my favorites from the trip. We were done photographing the wildlife for the day, and heading back to our tent lodge for the night. We saw some color in the sky and I asked my guide to drive to a spot with a good acacia tree in the foreground. At that point the setting sun was behind the clouds and we thought we would just get a little color in the background, but no actual sunset. One of photo tour guests who was in the car with me, said "I think the sun is starting to show." And sure enough, the sun made a full appearance in the perfect spot. We took many photos as the sun appeared and then dropped below the horizon, and I honestly did not think they would yield much. But after seeing the original and then playing with it in Photoshop, it blew me away. I increased the exposure a bit (since I was shooting at -1.7 exposure comp to protect the highlights), brought up the shadows to show the colors in the sky and show some of the animals at the bottom of the frame (even though they are hard to see here). I darkened the highlights to accentuate the colors in the sun, and added saturation to try and match what we saw when taking the photo. Once again, minor tweaks that make a big difference!

I hope that these examples will help you with your photo retouching, and take your good photos to great!

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Monday, February 20, 2023

On my way to Tanzania again!

I am writing this blog from Heathrow airport in London, about halfway to our final destination in Africa. As many of you know, Tanzania is one of my favorite places in the world, and definitely an amazing place to photograph wildlife. As I sit here in the airport lounge, a little bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, I started looking back at some of my favorite images from my previous trips to Tanzania. I thought I would share some of those with you now.

The following images are in chronological order.

We came across these two elephants grazing amongst the acacia trees, and it was an overcast morning. The muted light really helped to make this such a cool photo.

On my first visit to the hippo pool in the Serengeti, there was a lot of running water and a lot of activity amongst these large animals. It is always fun to wait for the big opening of their mouths and then getting shots like this.

This is one of the most difficult photos I have taken in Tanzania. This motion pan was taken at 1/30th sec, with me hand holding a Canon 200-400mm lens.

Photographing elephants is always incredible, but catching them with their youngsters is even better!

This group of elephants with nice big tusks, came right towards our vehicle. The bright blue sky in the background worked well for this scenic photo.

I have seen lions hanging out in trees before, but this was the first time I saw more than 12 lions in one tree. It was an epic moment!

Did I mention how much I like the baby elephants? :)

We see a lot of baboons on our safaris. This one was hanging out next to the parking area where we stopped before entering the Ngorongoro crater. It wasn't until I was reviewing my mages that evening that I noticed the perfect symmetry of this baboon.

In that same location, we witnessed this beautiful moment between mother and baby.

On this particular day, we came across a herd of elephant crossing the plains of the Serengeti. These two youngsters stopped and were sparring for quite a long time. I love the interaction between them.

I remember this moment so well. It was the end of the day and we had a little bit of sunlight left. We looked for some big cats to capture and did not find any, so we decided to stop and photograph these young baboons playing the trees.

This photo was taken on the way to the air strip, before we took off to our next location. We always leave early in case we spot something good, and that day we definitely did. There were at least 3 generations of lion together in this spot.

Photographing the spotted cats is on the top of my list at every safari. On this afternoon we followed this leopard for at lest an hour. It stopped on this rock and took a rest. I had our guide move the vehicle so we would have a great background far in the distance. Just after we moved, it looked up into the light rain and yawned. We all fired off a ton of photos at this moment.

During the Great Migration, millions of wildebeest cross the Mara river. It is not uncommon for the crocodiles to try and score some lunch during the crossings. This giant croc lunged for the wildebeests but missed catching any of them. At this point they started jumping over the crocodile to get out of harms way. We were all shooting and cheering at the same time. It was such an awesome moment!

Before the lions grow up to be the kings of the jungle, they start looking like this. Honestly, there is nothing cuter than cubs in the wild.

This photo was taken on our last safari. We had been out photographing all day and were heading back to our camp as the sun was setting. I asked our guide to wait in this spot to get the acacia tree silhouetted in front of the setting sun. I then saw that one of our other vehicles was heading towards the tree and prepared everyone in my vehicle to capture this scene.

Also from our last safari, this lioness had been feeding on a zebra carcass, when she got up and started walking towards us. The late afternoon sun was right into her eyes and made this shot that much better.

It will take us a day to get to Tanzania, but on Wednesday we will start the hunt for the next favorite images. For this trip I am bringing the following gear:

* Canon R5 camera

* Canon R6 camera

* Canon 200-400mm lens (with RF-EF adaptor)

* Canon RF100-500mm lens

* Canon RF24-105mm lens

* Lots of ProGrade Digital memory cards

* Apple 16" MacBook Pro

* Crucial 4TB x8 SSDs

I look forward to capturing more images and sharing those with you soon!

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Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Goodbye Drobo, Hello QNAP - My new data storage solution!

As you can imagine, the process of transferring all of my data from one hard drive system to another is a daunting task, and not one I looked forward to. But...about 6 months ago I got a letter in the mail stating that Drobo was going bankrupt, just as my trusted Drobo 8D was crashing every 6 hours or so. This drive has EVERY digital photo I have taken since 1990. I was also using two of the Drobo 810n NAS drives to remotely backup my data more than a hundred miles from my house. These stopped working correctly as well.

It was panic time!

I tried reaching out to my contacts at Drobo, and they did whatever they could to try and fix the issues, but the writing was on the wall. I needed to investigate new NAS solutions and do it quickly!

I was doing a workflow presentation for B&H, and as part of that I mentioned my dilemma. I said that if anyone out there knew of a good replacement solution to let me know. I received numerous emails from listeners and one of them mentioned QNAP. I really did not know know much about QNAP, but looked at their website and saw the solutions they offered.

I reached out to their support people and peppered them with questions.

I wanted to know about:

* The speed of their devices

* Remote synchronization abilities

* Remote access from anywhere in the world

* Over the air synch of data from my phone

* Management utilities and options

The answers I got were really encouraging. They had really great hardware, remote synchronization options and a lot more. I then reached out to their corporate marketing people to learn more.

As it turned out, they are located in Southern California, and I was scheduled to be down near their offices last December. A meeting was set up and I met them to get even more information, and to see their products in more detail. This time I was totally blown away. I brought a long list of features that I required and another list of features I had long wanted from Drobo. QNAP was able to deliver on all of them!

Fast forward a couple of months and I am now moving ALL of my data to the QNAP TVS-h874 NAS drive, which is populated with 8 of the Seagate IronWolf 20TB hard drives. Yep, this will give me more than 100TB of storage, even set up in Raid 6 (which means all my data is safe even if two drives fail at the same time).

I have been moving the data (literally millions of images) from my old Drobo 8D to the QNAP drive over the last 5 days, and I am almost done. I hope to have everything on the QNAP by the end of tomorrow. Then my plan is to replicate everything from the TVS-h874 NAS drive to the TS-832PX NAS drive (which has 8 of the 16TB Seagate IronWolf drives in it). This second box is the one that will be placed offsite. I want to get all the data on the second drive here locally so that I am not trying to remotely synchronize all this data over the Internet. Once I get everything copied to the second drive, then I will set it up for nightly synchronization from my location to the location in far from here.

I have yet to set up everything, but I wanted to let all of your Drobo users out there, that there is a great alternate solution. Not only does it do what Drobo did, it also happens to be way more powerful, have a ton more features, and a substantially better user interface.

This is what the web-based user interface looks like. I have yet to dive into all of these options yet, but I will report back once I am fully up and running.

I have tried accessing files on the TVS-hx74 NAS drive while traveling and it is amazing how much faster and easier it is than using the Drobo. What used to take 10 minutes can now be done in 1 minute. I love that!

Stay tuned for more information on my data transition. I am sure there is a lot more information to come.

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