Baby Giraffe

The Irish Photographic Federation publish a year book annually, and take submissions from photographers all over Ireland to have their work showcased in it.  Each photographer can submit up to 5 colour and 5 monochrome photographs.  I did so this year, and as usual it was a last minute rush to get everything ready to submit.

When I looked at my final submission of 10 images, I noted that I had blogged about 9 of them in the past, and so for the sake of completeness, thought I should post the 10th, which is this image, taken last month in Dublin Zoo.

You might remember that my visit to Dublin Zoo on that occasion was facilitated with early access to the zoo before it opened to the general public, although this photograph was taken much later in the morning as the zoo was getting busier.

I wanted to try to get a photograph of one of the younger giraffes in the herd – is a group of giraffes a herd?  Is the plural of giraffe giraffes? – and when I got to their area the young ones were indoors in their dark giraffe house, and this guy (or girl?) was standing behind the open door.

If I let the camera do its thing in terms of metering and exposure, the shot was going to be bland at best – and the glass was extremely dirty between me and the giraffe.  I did spot though that some sunlight coming in from the crack between the door and the door frame was creating a nice edge light on his neck and head, so I decided to expose for that, and let the rest of the shot go dark.

The idea was that the edge light did a good job at defining the shape of the giraffe, and it being a fairly distinctive animal anyway, I could afford to underexpose the rest of the shot and still not lose the fact that the subject of the photograph was indeed a baby giraffe.

The effect worked better than I hoped for, and as there was minimal colour left in the shot, I did a quick monochrome conversion and bumped the contrast to make it almost entirely pure black and pure white – something I’ve done before.

It’s a quirky kind of shot – you might like it or hate it.  I like it.  And we’ll see if the good people in the IPF who are choosing images for the year book like it also.