The Sentinel

The zebra may look like a horse in a pin-stripe suit to you and I, but to most of the predators in Africa they look like dinner.  The stripes are an evolutionary adaptation, that not only makes it more difficult for individual animals to be picked out in a herd by colour-blind hunters like lions, but also apparently to annoying and disease carrying horseflies.   


You can read more the fascinating research behind the science of this here:  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/120209-zebra-stripes-horseflies-bugs-akesson-science/


You'd think that photographing a grass-eating herbivore like the zebra, conveniently clumped together in large numbers, would be relatively easy.  But like so many things in Africa, nothing is as obvious as it appears on the surface.  For instance, what's the most dangerous animal in Africa? Nothing so exciting as any of the "Big Five" coveted by the big game hunters on safari in days of yore.  Rather its the notoriously short-tempered and extremely territorial hippo.  And if you wanted to get technical about dangerous lifeforms, the malaria-carrying mosquito is responsible for far more deaths in Africa than anything on four legs.  But back to the zebra and trying to photograph said equine.


Like many of the herd animals you encounter in Africa, when you approach a herd of zebras they kind of skitter away.  And they turn their rump to you at the same time!  It's a little like trying to push a piece of string.  I have a lot of shots of zebra asses, which is NOT a species of striped donkeys...   And the thing is, the zebra is so distinctive an element in the African landscape that you really WANT to get that zebra shot.  But when you're a favoured entre on just about everybody's menu, well, hey, I can understand being a little bit jumpy.


The Sentinel is named for the stallion in the herd who looked directly as me the entire time I was shooting his herd.  They didn't move away on this occasion, in part I think because we were on the opposite side of a large watering hole.  And this shot was another example of not really knowing what you have with a shot until you print it.  I always liked the composition in this shot and the contrast of the textures.  


It works in colour, but it really kind of 'Pops!' in black and white.  But it wasn't until I saw it as a 32 x 40 print that I really knew what I had.  The print has layers and depth and you can stand in front of it for many minutes.  There's an extraordinary amount of detail and you can clearly make out eleven of the twelve separate individual zebras in the group portrait.  There's the stallion, his mares, two brand new foals and a couple of yearlings.  It's a family portrait that tells a story.  And my eyes keep coming back to the zebra dead square in the centre of the photograph who stares back at me as if somebodies life depended on him knowing what I was up to.  And the thing is, most of the time, it does.