Wildlife Photography at Sunrise

The airstrip is a great place to be just before sunrise. It’s right in the centre of the reserve, and close to the Banyini which is also an open area and has a well-frequented waterhole. Upon arriving at the airstrip I always switch off the vehicle and spend a while listening carefully to the sounds, many of which are amplified off the sandstone ridge to the north. If there are lions roaring, or a leopard sawing, hyenas whooping or wild dogs hoo-calling then you can get a good idea of the sound’s direction and follow up in that way. I also always scan the airstrip with binoculars, especially if there’s ‘nothing’ there. Plains game choose to spend the night on the airstrip as it’s open and they have a better chance of spotting predators approaching, but it’s also a favourite place for predators to lurk on the periphery and ambush prey.

On this morning there was a herd of wildebeest that had spent an uneventful night on the airstrip, and they were just starting to amble off to graze, kicking up dust as they went. While I was still keeping an ear out for any sounds, the wildebeest, not known for their incredible good looks, provided a creative opportunity to work with the rising sun, backlight and creeping colour.

For these photographs I used the Manual setting on my camera, because Auto would have tried to negotiate an average exposure for the dark twilight foreground and bright sunrise background resulting in the wildebeest still being too dark, too much colour detail in the sky and a grainy high ISO. I wanted the wildebeest correctly exposed to see the detail on their coats, and the sunrise slightly blown out but still giving off colour warmth.

Then in post-production in Photoshop I had some fun by adjusting the white balance. White balance is the adjustment of a digital photograph to make its colours appear more realistic. It’s a way to set a photograph to neutral, to make the whites look white. When you shoot in RAW each photographic file contain a high amount of detail. (JPEGs compress details into a much smaller file size with less space to store image data.)

The white balance options you can choose from are: As Shot, Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Flourescent, Flash and Custom.

Here are the results from manipulating the white balance, and a few other options such as increasing or reducing shadows and highlights, and pushing or pulling vibrance: The first photo is with the white balance as As Shot, the second with Fluorescent and the third with Shade plus Vibrance reduced by 50%.