There is a kind of light photographers complain about and then drive four hours to sit in. It is flat, it is white, it comes from overhead, and it bleaches the ground until the ground and the sky are the same tone. Every guide tells you to put the camera away and wait for the afternoon.
The best frames I brought back from Namibia were made in it.
The light nobody wants
This is Etosha, at about two in the afternoon — the hour every guide tells you to be back at the lodge with your feet up.
The situation was simple enough. Pale ground, pale air, animals a long way off, and heat haze between us doing what heat haze does to a long lens. Expose for the scene and you get a grey photograph of a grey animal on a grey plain. Expose for the animal and everything behind it goes.
So I exposed for the animal and let everything behind it go.
Deciding what to lose
A high-key photograph is not a photograph with the brightness turned up. It is a photograph where you have decided, in advance, which information you are willing to throw away and never get back.
On a zebra that decision is easy, because the subject is already black and white. Take the ground out and what is left is the one thing the animal is made of — stripes, overlapping, crossing, getting in each other’s way in a group until you cannot tell where one animal ends.
In plain terms, and without turning this into a tutorial: I metered so the darkest part of the subject sat where I wanted it, accepted that the background would go to white, and watched the stripes rather than the exposure warning. The rest was done later, gently, in the edit.
For the record: medium format, a GFX100S II with the GF 500mm, and the frames were made in black and white rather than converted to it afterwards. The edit was small — a little more contrast, a little more exposure, nothing else. Most of the decision was taken in the field, which is the point of the post.
When the subject has one line
The same decision does different work on a different animal. A giraffe’s head on a blank ground stops being a giraffe in a landscape and becomes a shape: the knuckle of the skull, the horns, the line of the neck leaving the frame at the bottom.
An ostrich is nearly all neck, and on white it becomes a single curve with an eye in it.
Neither of those pictures tells you anything about Namibia. That is the trade. You lose the place and you get the animal.
The leopard, in colour
Which is why the set needs the leopard.
Dry grass, late colour, an animal moving through it with its shoulder blades working. Nothing removed, nothing bleached, everything where it was. Put it beside the zebras and it is obvious the white frames were a choice and not a fault in the camera.
There was no luck in it. The tip-off came over the radio, our guide turned the vehicle around, and by the time we arrived there were already a few cars at the sighting. We stayed about an hour.
What I would do again
Two things, both small. Shoot the high-key frames as a set rather than one at a time. They work in pairs — two zebra frames hung together say more than either does alone, and I did not see that until I was home with them side by side on a screen.
And keep one ordinary frame of every subject. The restrained version is the one that proves you were not hiding a bad background. It is also, often, the one people want on a wall.
The full Namibia set is on SmugMug.