Looking Deeper at Leopards, with Penny Robartes
I recently completed a private photo safari with a repeat client. While both small group and private phot tours each have their own merits, the beauty with my guest embarking on private photo tour with me was that we could work on her specific goals and interests for the duration of our time together.
We would be spending a week at MalaMala Game Reserve, a spectacular wildlife destination in South Africa that is known for it incredible density of Leopard and viewing thereof, other Big 5 members such as Elephant that gather in their breeding herds at the Sand River’s waters for bathing and drinking. They current have a pride of Lion numbering 18, which includes cubs of various ages. It is a visually beautiful area with Africa’s top predators and plains game calling it home.
A couple of days before I met my guest, we discussed the upcoming tour and the great question; do you have specific goals in mind for our time together? When the time came and we met up the evening before the safari at InterContinental at OR Tambo for dinner, my guest showed me some examples of images that inspire her and fit in with her photographic objective; to create fine-art, emotive images of Leopard that she can hang on her wall. I was heartened and humbled to see that her examples were images of mine; Leopard images that I had in fact, created during past private photo safaris to MalaMala. This was great for me as as the creator of the images, I knew exactly the emotion and atmosphere that my guest wanted to achieve, and this would come with a combination of both in camera creation and post-processing.
And so our safari began.
As safari-travellers, and myself as a long time traveller and photographic leader, my guest and I were aware that not all great wildlife sightings equate into great photographs, and not all into fine-art, minimalist ones at that. We approached every sighing with open eyes and no expectations, which I always encourage. This not only ensures that unrealistic expectations aren’t created, but in order to allow your intuition and creativity flow uninhibited, we have to approach wildlife sightings with a sense of curiosity and awareness of being in that particular situation as it is, not as we imagine it to be. Then, you can look with creativity and this is where I assist my guests the most; by reading the scene, interpreting it and the animal’s behaviour, and how I can describe it to my guest in order to better assist them in achieving their photographic telling of the scene.
“At a certain point you say to the woods,
To the sea, to the mountains, the world,
Now I am ready.”
- Annie Dillard
Are you ready to take your next step in your photographic journey?
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