The mud hole

Elephants protect their skin from insects by taking mud baths. In this shot from Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, this family of elephants were glistening from the light of a setting sun. In this park, vehicles are restricted to the road; even making tire tracks in the dirt around the water hole, which means going off the road, could get a guide fired from his job. I shot this with film in 2000, and the longest lens I had for my Mamiya RZ 67 was a 500mm lens which, in terms of magnification, was equivalent a 280mm telephoto in the full-frame digital format. This is not very long, so I had to get as close as possible to the action to get frame-filling shots. My settings were unrecorded, but back then I didn't use a meter. I just used my brain, and I can say that my settings -- based on years of experience of assessing light -- were 1/125 and f/5.6 1/2 (back then we used half f/stops instead of 1/3 f/stops like we do now).