Late winter pm our safari vehicle whilst at Ngala we came across a herd of +-700 strong buffalo. They were slowly heading towards a waterhole nearby so after a short session with them we left the herd to wait for them to come to water. It is always a spectacle with large herds as they often start running or moving quickly to water once they get a whiff of it. Unfortunately after a long patient wait, by the time they arrived,the the sunset disappeared but we got to see them piling into the water stretching around a hundred meters or so.
I found it difficult to isolate this bull in particular amongst the mobile herd. His horns are very typical of the gene pool I observed in E Africa at Lake Manyara. Very wide and with shallow depth to the horns. There were a number of frames of him on his own but there is always a bush that seems to move into focus in front of the subject as I'm shooting. This is FF. I did attempt to work on the shadow areas but left it as is with only a slight improvement. I tried other variations of a crop but this is the only one that seemed presentable. As for a portrait head/horn crop the IQ is will not stand up to it.
7d - canon 70-200mm Mkii @ 160mm
ISO 800 - f5,6 - 1/800 sec - HH from safari vehicle
Carl, you did well to isolate the subject among the crowd, I too faced the same prob in South Africa. The horns are much wider and thinner than the ones we saw in Timbavati. Nice head angle and eye contact.
Hi Carl - It can definitely be tough to separate one buffalo when they are in such a large herd. That certainly is a wide spread of the horns and interesting to see. He gave you a nice pose to show them off. I just wish they weren't intersecting with the horns of the buffalo in the bg. If it were mine I would back off on the sharpening of the grass slightly.
Hi Carl, any large herd or pack of animals is always difficult to isolate, or indeed avoid not cropping something. My suggestion would be either go super wide, tight in, or just wait for a single subject to come into frame.
Without being there it's hard to advise just on a crop, but perhaps a little tighter and moving the frame more to the left, avoiding the LH buff and focusing more on the two main heads may have been better??? Also waiting a fraction more so the main Buff turns towards you would give you a better image and the horns would not intersect with the RH one. One thing you can do is drop the Blue, evident in the LH buffs horn, but even more so in the BKG small buff on the RHS sporting a blue set of horns.
Interesting horns indeed! Tough call on the composition here...good suggestions above. With these dense herds I try to get one isolated in the frame (going tight and getting no horns criss-crossing for example), or go asbtract with shallow DOF, or as Steve said wide for the entire scene (animalscape). You handled the harsh light well here - buffalo are very tricky when the light creeps out of Golden Hour.
Seen a few of these in my time. So different compared to the norm. Most of the males we see where I am their horns are pretty short and smaller. I remember my time in Thornybush and I saw so many males with very large horns in comparison to where I am now. Also interesting how the eyes are sunk in. Its always amazed me how different each male buffalo looks from another.
Anyway, nice light and details.
Interesting horns. A bit more "elegant" than the usually more robust ones we see. Looks like the one on the left side really wanted to get into the pic too.
Uucommon spread of Buff horns
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