Image of the Week (April Week 4)

I have continued my journey through my photographic archive this week and a glimpse of an image I took in India and a need to produce some work for friends to view, led me to remind myself of a trip we made to Satpura National Park, Madhya Pradesh, in search of tigers.  I enjoyed the trip, but my immediate thoughts when I returned home were that I had not seen the a tiger, the sloth bears had been elusive, secretive and uncooperative and whilst we had enjoyed a number of excellent sightings of leopards – way better than we had ever experienced in Africa – somehow my overwhelming feelings of disappointment were slow to clear.  Indeed, long enough for me to forget and not revisit a good set of images.

I recalled that on this trip in 2015 I was in search of my photographic mojo.  I had been successful in gaining an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society some years before and had achieved success in international competitions, but my creative abilities and my enthusiasm for wildlife photography was waning.  In an effort to reignite my fire, I spent much time, when there were no tigers, or any other wildlife for that matter, photographing trees – a subject some of you will recall I spoke about last week in my Image of the Week post.  Trees hold a fascination for me, and I remember as a young photographer at university, producing a number of images of trees – dead ones in particular!

Well, back to India, apart from lots of leopard shots, the one below being one of my favourites (I think it captures the leopard stalking its prey perfectly) I found some interesting images of trees, and mainly not straight shots but ones where I had used intentional camera movement or hung my camera outside of the safari truck.

Moving on to the trees, I was fascinated from our first day by what our guide called “ghost” trees.  These trees, native to India, are commonly known as Marathi.  It is a medium-sized deciduous tree with horizontally spreading branches, growing to about 15 metres.  I was particularly attracted to this Marathi next to the curving track on which we were travelling.

In the low light of morning and dusk, I was able to slow down my shutter speed sufficient to create some interesting shots.  I loved the more muted colours, and wanted to create a sense of being among the trees.  These are a selection of my efforts:

This final image is my Image of the Week but it was a close run thing between India Trees 5 above.