Pixiq

The Life-Sized Giraffe: Capturing Two Extremes

One way to capture the essence of unusual animals, such as giraffes, is to highlight the extremes of their existence in your photographs.

As I headed to Tanzania for a two-week safari, I had a certain portrayal of a giraffe in mind: I wanted to emphasize the animal’s height by taking a vertical composite panorama that I could, someday, print at life size. Never mind that no printer to which I had access could make the print; someday, I was convinced, I’d be able to do it, and it would be very cool.

On this trip, I was carrying the very first Canon D-SLR, the D30, and while I had been creating panoramic images with film for decades, I had a sense that the digital camera was going to vastly enhance my success with multiple-image composites. All I needed was a cooperative giraffe that would hold still while I captured the series of images. That subject was, it turned out, quite elusive.

I love how giraffes move through their environment; they flow, they’re calm, and they almost never run. But they don’t really stand motionless for long, even when they’re looking right at you and sizing you up. So while I kept trying to capture my vertical panorama, I had to be open to other ways to interpret a giraffe’s size and to explore the potential of my new digital equipment.

One afternoon I looked out across the Serengeti and saw in the distance a female giraffe with her baby. The two were dwarfed by a massive umbrella thorn acacia tree, the giraffe’s staple food source. These two iconic symbols of Africa, the giraffe and the towering umbrella tree, told the story of an unusual animal in an extreme environment.

Photographing an animal in its natural surroundings is not often an easy composition. The environment needs to stand cleanly and identifiably as a supporting element in the image, but cannot overpower the main subject—the animal. At such great distance, this image could have been a couple of giraffe dots and a tree on a big, messy desert landscape—a throwaway. But, I realized that with my 500mm lens, a 2x converter, and the 1.6x magnification factor of the Canon digital camera sensor, I had in my hands the means to photograph at 1600mm—a great tool for a technique I call “optical extraction,” which is pulling a compelling composition from within a larger scene. The extreme result isolated the giraffes and the tree, making a simple statement that rendered the tallest of all land-living species small in its own world.

TIP: Before you get to your location, imagine the images you want to capture and the message you want to convey. But when you get there, be open to compositions that may portray the exact opposite of what you had imagined.

My two professional colleagues on the trip were still working exclusively with film, and they made no secret of their concern for my sanity as I worked again and again with my digital setup, trying to get everything I could out of all three megapixels. And on the next to last day of the safari, I was rewarded with a giraffe that was curious enough about me to watch quietly while  I photographed it with seven horizontal captures that came together in a panorama. Three years later, with the advent of the 60-inch (152.4-cm) professional printer, I was able to make my 12-foot-tall print (approximately 3.66 meters). Some people think it’s extreme, but they also think it’s pretty cool.

In the end, I came away with my two favorite photographs of giraffes, depicted at opposite extremes of their existence: one dominates his environment, just as I had planned, and the other is dwarfed by it, as I discovered.