I was at the Jacksonville Zoo in 2020 and came across this elephant and I was standing in this cave section but the Elephant appeared to be so much closer than it appeared. The elephant stopped walking dead in its tracks and was just looking at me while I looked at it. I’m not sure what it was thinking but I was in pure amazement. The funny thing is as it approached me I never heard it coming towards me. How could something so big have such a light step is what I asked myself.
I cropped the photo this way because the elephant in the first picture was so much closer and bigger than the photo captures. Everything around me did not even matter to me in the moment. All I saw was the elephant and that it was looking or what appeared to be looking directly at me. The first/original picture was beautiful to me but it just didn’t capture the spacial appearance to what it felt like in real life. I felt like a few more feet and I could have reached out and touched it. This elephant must have been extremely used to humans to allow us to get this close to each other.
Keith, I love this image you took. The primary image looked like you were the one hiding in the rocks and the elephant finding you, instead of the other way around. I felt like cropping it did bring down the quality of the image, it’s not as sharp as it was before. I like that you cropped it closer to the elephant, but I would’ve kept the original horizontal framing and gone closer to the face, even if it meant cropping the trunk some.