Not as exciting as the fight covered here but this was from my trip last December. Did a little enhancement using Picnik.com to bring out the details. Used a Nikon 80-200D at 200mm on my D70.
Thanks, Roger. The power of this individual (I think he's the alpha seen in Justin's photos) can be felt in his presense. Of all the shots I took this day, this one where he was still surveying the area before sitting down showed that presense the best.
In many ways I can get far better animal pictures at my zoo. But one area that Disney wins out, hands down, is in the landscaping and theming. If I were to post a picture of my local zoo's alpha male, you'd see him sitting on a concrete floor with his back to a concrete wall. It's not a bad gorilla area, they have plenty of fake trees higher up, but below them there's a ditch like area, a trench that keeps the gorillas separated from the people. The alpha is ALWAYS down there, looking dejected. I can only guess that he's symbolically guarding his group. They just don't have the budget for the sort of lavish landscaping that goes on at AK. Nice pictures, guys. They put me in the mood for the animal hunt event at Mousefest.
Here is my portrait and another one just for fun. I have never been on the Pangani trail before!! It is cool. i cant believe how close the gorillas are. Here he is just "hanging out"
Craig, Nice closeups. You got the eyes much clearer than mine. Was he in shade? The background looks very bright compared to him.
When you irritate the alpha Here he is. 390mm equiv, with the 70-300DO. Exposure Time: 0.0080 s (1/125) Aperture: f/6.3 ISO equiv: 1000 I opened DAK my last morning in FL, went straight to Africa, picked up a FP to Kilimanjaro, then went over to Pangani Forest. There were more CMs than guests that early! I only saw 4 other guests by the time I left. Two others were using tripods with their Minolta camera - but the treat was that there were about 4 gorillas in the valley for breakfast. The alpha was roaming and I got a few snaps near the entrance to the valley, but I moved towards the exit a little too quickly for his tastes. He growled and ran along side the ditch with me. Then he sat down and began staring for a few mins. During which time I got this (among others) picture of him. After that he decided I wasn't a threat and moved back towards the other side of the valley. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
Scottwdw, on this one I switched to center weighted metering from matrix metering and then set 1/2 stop overexpose. Thats how I photograph my black dogs, so I figured it would work on the black gorilla. I don't even know if thats the "right" way to do it, but it seems to work pretty good. Roger, that is a cool story. When we came up on these guys, another guest was really excited because one of the gorillas had just broke a limb off a tree and threw it at another gorilla. The guest said the limb shattered like glass, he threw it so hard.
That is a nice shot. I can't help but get a chill looking at shots like this. They're so close to people, yet so far. Physically, behaviorally, I keep wanting to think that we're so much alike, but at the same time we're so alien to each other. But back to the shot.. I never noticed the element of red before. I always thought of gorillas as being black.
