Professional Pachyderm

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

This is the third of the four images I'm planning to submit for the NC State Vet School photo contest. I took it in Manali, a small city in northern India that the British called a "hill station", to denote it as a starting point for expeditions into the higher peaks of the greater and trans Himalayas.

Artistically, I am really quite happy with this shot. I like the subject, I like the framing (probably as good as one can hope to get on a crowded city street), and I love the young boy peering down at me from high on the elephant's back. Technically, on the other hand, the picture has some issues... most of which speak to the difficulty in capturing a moment on film. Take a closer look, and the young boy as well as the driver are not sharply in focus. Additionally, at larger magnifications, it becomes clear that the elephant was flapping its ear, leaving the top blurred.

How could I have avoided those problems? Well, the people aren't sharp because my aperture was too open. The ear is blurred because the shutter speed wasn't fast enough. My shutter speed was a rather pedestrian 1/50 sec. By cranking my ISO up from 100, even if only to 160 (the upper limit of what my camera can handle without getting grainy), I could've cut out some of the movement.

I guess that these technical issues speak to the importance of anticipating a shot. I didn't know that this shot was going to be there until an instant before I took the picture. On that timeline, you can't set the camera after you see the shot- you have to see the shot before it's there. I didn't, so I'm left with the shot I took, which has its strengths despite its flaws.