The day after I graduated from law school, I was on a plane to Nairobi.  My aunt and uncle worked in the Peace Corps back in the day, and one of my cousins was actually born there.  Now, some three decades later, they wanted to take the family back to see the village where they had taught and the vibrant country it is in.  Of course my immediate family jumped on that opportunity.  After a few days in transit, we finally arrived at our lodgings just outside the Maasai Mara National Reserve.  Even the accommodations in the Kenyan bush can’t help but be interesting:

Here, I encountered some baby warthogs (wart piglets?) right outside my door.

 

And this shot of the sunrise was taken right from our camp.

 

Unsurprisingly, a photo safari is a dream trip for a nature photographer, but I have to admit I was unprepared.  Literally, as it turned out.  On our first day, the very first photo op caught me completely by surprise.  This is because it occurred before we even left the property we were staying on, outside the park.  Some five minutes after the land rover set off, we were driving through the bush to get to the main road into the reserve, when we so some movement in up ahead.  It turned out to be a troop of baboons who either spooked by our presence or were late to some baboon event, because they came out from the trees sprinting by our vehicle.camera in my lap, but I had not even adjusted a setting yet.

The baboons emerged and were passing so quickly I barely had time to turn on my Nikon, blindly guess an appropriate shutter speed, and start shooting.  For the next 30 seconds, as groups of baboons emerged from the trees, I would pan the camera from right to left as they ran by, hoping but doubting a single shot would come out.  After they’d passed, I scanned the photos on my camera to see what I’d gotten.  They were almost all out of focus or blurred by the motion of trying to track these animals at high speed.  But then I came to one photo that was in focus, and where the speed I had panned my camera had perfectly matched the speed of the baboons in that instant.  Their legs were in motion, but one of them had been looking at me for the entire duration of the exposure, providing a strangely evocative focal point for the picture:

This was my first keeper from what ended up being an incredible photo safari.  To see the other highlights, check out my East Africa (Safari) gallery.

Growing up in this day and age, I took it as a given that wild animals are afraid of people. There are exceptions, of course: many of us have had encounters with impertinent squirrels, raccoons, or a variety of opportunistic birds living near any habitual outdoor eating space. These animals that have become accustomed to living in our world without concerted hunting or harassment have learned we need not be feared. That said, beyond urban areas, I was always told if wanted to see some wildlife (on a hike, for example), I had to be quiet because animals run away when they hear people. That just seemed natural. But it’s not.

While it is certainly natural for particularly smaller animals to be wary of and run from larger potential predators, animals are not innately conditioned to flee the sight of all other animals. This makes some intuitive sense; otherwise, nature would be filled with creatures constantly sprinting away from each other, only to run into another animal and flee in a different direction in an endless repeating ricochet. Tranquility would not exist.

You hear about “untouched” places like the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador — ecosystems remote enough to have had the good fortune not to be exposed to humanity for at least recent memory. In these locations, you can observe animals that haven’t learned to run from us. Neither these creatures nor their ancestors recognized humans as predators and therefore do not fear us. It may seem trivial, but being in these situations can be a special experience, especially for a photographer.

This has all basically been a long-winded way of saying, “if you ever have the opportunity to visit Antarctica, I highly recommend you do so.” The ice is stunning, from the tiniest snowflakes to tabular icebergs that can cover thousands of square miles and rise over 500 feet above the water — yet still have 90% of their mass underwater.  The biggest tabular icebergs we saw were about 150 feet tall:

Beyond the ice, though, the wildlife is also pretty spectacular.  With the notable exception of the decimated whale populations, Antarctic fauna have had no reason to learn to fear mankind. This can lead to some amusing interactions and memorable photos.

Penguins are of particular note in this respect, and not only because they number in the millions down there. At times, they are as curious about us as we are about them:

Yet for the most part, as long as you don’t act threateningly, penguins tend to go about their lives as if we were not there.

Penguins spend much of their time along the coastlines. They need to swim to catch fish and move longer distances, but their major predators are almost entirely aquatic, so they pick their moments and indeed places to get in the water. And because the land rises sharply uphill from the coast in many places, penguins tend to walk — in comical single file — along paths next to the water along what are dubbed “penguin highways.” At one point I found myself next to one of these highways as a procession approached. So I just knelt down with my camera and waited as they proceeded by:

Antarctica is a spectacular place. Unfortunately I was there early in my photographic career and did not have as good a camera as I’d have liked, but click here to see some highlights from that trip.