August 16, 2013
Elephants in Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania

I'm always looking for ways to photograph a subject differently. For wildlife, where I mostly use a super telephoto lens (500mm or 600mm), using a normal (around 50mm) or wide-angle (less than 40mm) lens is about as different as you can get. One of the challenges when photographing wildlife with a normal or wide-angle lens is that the background becomes an integral part of the composition instead of being a non-distracting element. Also, the subject still has to be fairly large in the frame which means you have to be able to get much closer to it. The African elephant on the left in this image was really close to the road, like maybe 10 yds (10 m) away, and the cloud nicely filled in the sky and helped point to the second elephant that was further from the road.