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.