2012 | Maasai Mara, Kenya
I never understood giraffes until I met them on their range, seeing six of them completely ‘cloaked’ right in front of me in a thorn-tree thicket. Now, I have photographic evidence of their not being there.
And I had never seen a bird, colorful at a mile, and audible at two miles, until I woke up in the clarity and quiet of the Great Rift Valley. Or learned that If I see a hippopotamus, there are likely twenty others under the water, and I should be very careful, because even on land, they are fast, and they can bite you in half.
I had been wrestling with the problem of what equipment to take on safari, and how much of it. I was not comfortable taking a lot of gear and feeling its weight more than its utility, going into unknown spaces, banging against the hard metal of Land Rovers and Jeeps. But my friend Bernd rescued my thinking, saying, “Just take your normal equipment and use your usual method.”
So this is the kind of picture that I got. I’m very happy with it, and even more important, I know what to do with it.