I took this photo in one of my favourite national parks in Africa: ETOSHA, in Namibia. I've been in love with it for over 16 years now, and I'm now delighted to share it with our travellers. In this arid environment, the waterholes are very popular with the animals.
At Okaukuejo, you can admire the giraffes coming to drink, and at the end of the day, with the sun setting behind them, the light is magical and so are their reflections in the water! I like to flirt with abstraction. The gaze loses its bearings in this image while it is finally only an inverted reflection, with just enough wind to graphically blur the majestic silhouette, as well as the waves of the bird's movement which comes to cross the reflection of the giraffe just where I had been hoping for several evenings.
Starting from the RAW file, and having anticipated the final result as far as possible, I simply converted the image to black and white, invert it (upside down), then worked in two zones: to bring the light greys into pure white (overexposure) and the dark greys into deep black (underexposure and black accentuation), to make the image even more “contrasty”, graphic, with a purity reminiscent of a drawing with flat black and white areas.
