Female advance

And the type of advance to be wary of when the female happens to be an elephant!

Generally elephant bulls are very tolerant and allow close approach, as long as they are not in musth and as long as you respect them and don't piss them off that is, but females of a breeding herd are a totally different story and need to be treated with much more care. Our boat drifting close to the shore quite far from a herd already prompted this female to approach us head on to show how big she is and to warn us off. Staying humble and calm luckily kept her calm too.

For this image I tried some processing with Nik HDR-Efex and Topaz Adjust (trial versions) just to see if these programmes would be helpful and make my workflow easier with images that have a large tonal range. Like in this case the sky was looking almost white in the original capture (which I did deliberately to get good detail on the elephant) and needed to be 'recovered'. So far I learned that these types of programmes need to be used with great care and that you have to watch what happens at pixel level by looking at 100% magnification at all times. Strange things can happen, particularly on stark edges, like unsharpness, halo's and colour shifts. Taking a conservative approach is best for IQ. This conversion was done with very 'mild' settings in HDR-Efex, but I need to do some more testing before I am convinced this program is worth buying.

Camera Model Canon EOS-5D Mark II
Shutter Speed 1/250 Sec.
Aperture Value f/8
ISO Speed 800
Lens EF24-105mm f/4L IS USM @ 32mm
Crop is app 80% of original (to lose some empty space on the right and top and a sliver from the bottom to get rid of water showing on the right)
HH, from small boat