500px Editors' Choice : Brave Elephant by MarselvanOosten

On all our tours and workshops I encourage our guests to also shoot verticals, not only horizontals. Magazines for instance, are all based on verticals, so if you ever want your picture to grace the cover or to be published on a full page, you’ll need to shoot verticals as well.

A little while back I got an email from British Airways, asking whether I had a vertical version of my famous picture The Edge, of an elephant at Victoria Falls. And as a matter of fact I did, I just never processed it. When I started processing the image, I wondered why I hadn’t done it earlier – the vertical version seems to make more sense because you can actually see the height of the falls and you can see all the water falling down.

Anyway, British Airways published the shot and I was happy they had given me a good reason to dive into my image library again.

Here’s the background story that I wrote for the horizontal version:

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It’s hard enough to make original pictures, but with some subjects it simply borders the impossible.

When I was at Victoria Falls last year, I thought about the billions of photographs that must have been taken there, and I almost decided to just visit the place without my camera. That was until I spoke with some of the local people, who told me that they had seen a bull elephant crossing the Zambezi river the day before. During my research I had not seen any images of the falls with an elephant in it, so I decided to stay a few extra days and try my luck.

The course of the Zambezi is dotted with numerous tree-covered islands, which increase in number as the river approaches the falls. As the dry season takes effect, the islets on the crest become wider and more numerous, and with the water level of the Zambezi dropping, once submerged walkways and fresh foraging possibilities present themselves. This elephant was apparently aware of this.

On the third day I left very early with a small boat to reach my location. On my way to the edge I suddenly saw the lone bull wading through shallow parts of the river, but it was far away and light levels were low, so I decided to continue to the falls. I took some sunrise shots and half an hour later I saw the elephant approaching the falls. I quickly collected my gear and moved carefully towards the edge where the water plummeted into a 360ft chasm – not particularly nice when you’re afraid of heights… I set everything up in order to include as much as possible of the falls and made a composition. Luckily the elephant was aware of my preference to shoot into the light, so his position couldn’t be better.

After I took the shots, I knew I had just witnessed and captured something very special. Later that day local people confirmed this by telling me that they had never seen an elephant so close to the edge of the falls before – exactly what I wanted to hear!

This image was featured as a double page spread in National Geographic, and won First Prize in the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards.

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If you would like to join me on our next photo tour in Zambia and learn everything about wildlife photography, please check out my website for more information and tour impression video clips:

Squiver Photo Tours & Workshops

Hope to see you there!

Marsel

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