With the year’s ending I’m flicking through some recent images and this one jumped out.
This image was made a few flights and a long way from home in southern Uganda. For me, it visually resembles some of the feelings you get when photographing wildlife.
You can’t walk up to a lioness and expect to make a great image. You get it wrong a thousand times before finally get it right. And if that doubts you, you shouldn’t start in the first place.
The only way these images work is when you’re positioned at eyesight or below. So your only option is really to get as close as you can and when everything’s going together you feel that adrenaline rush. Without being energized by that uncertainty you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing.
There’re many blurry, not well composited lion images. However, every woman has something of a lioness in her. So the trick is to capture a resembling sensual composition, the full sense of serenity of the grass and intelligence from her eyes speaks in a viral image.
She is indeed “The Queen”…
Jochen van Dijk
Uganda
3/11/2017