In early May, Nick Brandt began posting the stories behind his beautiful and evocative portraits of African animals to his Facebook page. Brandt has graciously given us permission to reproduce them on photo-eye Blog.
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| Lion Before Storm II - Sitting Profile, Maasai Mara, 2006 — Nick Brandt |
Just as a portrait photographer might be captivated by a striking, characterful face on the street, so I'm drawn to a particular animal that I want to photograph.
So it was with this lion. I spent seventeen straight days with him. Waiting. But all he did was sleep —hour after hour, day after day — under a boring cloudless blue sky.
Finally, on the evening of the eighteenth day, a monumental storm rolled in. Just ahead of the storm came an incredibly powerful wind. The moment that the wind hit the lion, like a freight train, he sat up, facing into the wind, smelling the game on the air. After all these days spent in each other’s company, he was oblivious to me taking photos so close to him.
Shot as always on medium format black and white film without telephoto or zoom, the photo has shifting planes of focus that occur in camera at time of shooting, using a very crude poor-man’s version of a tilt shift lens. Some think they can achieve this in Photoshop, but that’s a physical impossibility — this ‘effect’ can only be achieved in camera.
Meanwhile, it is necessary to mention that the lion population of Africa is plummeting. There are now just an estimated 20,000 lions left across the entire continent, a drop of 75% in just 20 years.
In the Amboseli ecosystem, where Big Life Foundation operates, the organization I co-founded to help protect the wild animals of that part of the world, so far we are succeeding in maintaining the current lion population, through a compensation fund for the local communities when they lose livestock to predators. Go to www.biglife.org to learn more."—Nick Brandt
