MY FAVOURITE PHOTOS (2)

A reminder: the photos I'm posting on this blog come from a personal archive that goes back to 1979. Technically they are often flawed, but they just happen to be the ones I like best. Here's a second selection. All photos copyright Dick Pitman.

OK, here we go again...a nostalgia-trip to 1981, when black rhino were common at Mana Pools. I'd see five or six individual animals coming to drink in an afternoon at Chine Pool, where I took this photo. A print still hangs in the Parks office at Marongora. I accidentally spooked this rhino - shutters were a good deal noisier than they are today - and he took off, luckily not in my direction.  

This was "my" rhino. I used to seek him out whenever I went to Mana, usually finding him somewhere near what is now Mcheni 1. He'd browse in the scrub & thicket; drink from the river; and then sleep in the mahogany woodlands  west of today's campsite. Both these photos were taken with Canon FTb and Ektachrome 200. 

This is a black-and-white rendering from a transparency also taken at Chine Pool back in the early 1980's, mostly via the Photoshop "threshhold" control. I have some fairly strong views on black and white work - notably, that merely pressing the "greyscale" button on a likely-looking colour pic doesn't constitute competence - but one likes to play around sometimes!

In 1993, we began the relocation of 18 cheetah into the Matusadona National Park, in the first-ever "wild to wild" cheetah reintroduction ever carried out. Always loved this one, of a cheetah thoroughly enjoying a "back scratch"; and also - 

 - scent-marking a tree inside the very spacious boma we built on Fothergill Island, to house the captured cheetah before releasing them into the Matusadona. Their descendents still survive in the Park today. Around this time I experimented briefly with a Canon EOS, but found it very vulnerable to dust, heat and moisture, and soon went back to the Canon FTb's.

Lake Kariba was at very low levels during the 1980's and much of the '90's - hence our ability to build a large boma on the lake shore. Lake levels began to rise a few years later; however, this picture of the Nyamuni River (Palm Bay area) in flood in the early 2000's still shows a huge area of exposed lake shore. By now I was - very cautiously, and with some scepticism - dipping my toes into the alien world of digital photography, but not prepared to commit to anything more than a Canon Powershot S20 with - WOW!! - 3.7 megapixels!

Recently, the lake has more or less filled every year. But whether the lake is high or low, it has one overriding feature: the light. It cascades down from the sky; reflects back up from the water; and permeates every nook and cranny in the myriad creeks and skeletal trees. 

Don't dismiss the crushing midday sun; you can still capture striking images, if you keep your eyes open. This was taken at noon.

Later in the day, especially after sunset, the camera is likely to capture some amazing - and often unexpected - effects.

However, some things never change. Sunset with Darters, 1979, and...

...sunset with Openbills, 2011. 

A little bit of portraiture now: not a genre I often go in for, as I far prefer to depict my wildlife in habitat and context, and certainly not posing for the camera; but I am fond of these two - a deceptively absent-minded looking buffalo bull doing an Old Farmer Giles act, and a young lion learning how to exhibit flehmen. Also - 

- two studies of Vee, or Big Vic as some call him, who we had already known for a long time before we adopted him as our company logo, back in 2008. He's an iconic Mana bull, and - like most people - we've got hundreds of images of him; but these two, part of a quartet of similar studies, are among my personal favourites. 

I'm also fond of this photo of a young waterbuck, captured at Green Pool, in Mana Pools. 

One recent Facebook commenter said "Mana can be spooky". This sounded very strange to me, as I feel totally relaxed, totally at home, totally attuned to the Mana environment,  whether by night or day. But maybe they merely meant the equally extraordinary "enchanted woodlands" ambience that is, in my admittedly limited experience of the rest of the world, unique to Mana. 

But - I know I keep coming back to it - by October Mana's a dry, dusty desert. One longs for the rains to begin.  

The transformation is swift and almost unbelieveable, if you haven't seen it for yourself.

And although you may not see many "charismatic megamammals", the ones you do see will be in incredibly lovely settings.   

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