White Rhino, South Africa

Happy 94th Birthday Madiba (photo courtesy of Mandela digital archive)

There is no where I feel more comfortable than in the African bush. It is mornings like these when we stop for tea that I can just breathe and then feel it in my soul.

I think I am a photographer only because I want to keep some moments like these burned forever in my mind. 

I took my first trip to Africa in 2008.  This was one of the very first images that I looked at in the viewfinder on a camera that I barely knew how to operate. Having shot film for most of my life the doors were now blown wide open to a whole new digital world. But my vision remained the same. 

Although my passion for photographing wildlife has gone unchanged, things are not the same for South Africa's white rhino. The numbers have drastically decreased to an alarming staggering few.

When I see this photo, to me, it is a celebration of wild Africa. It is also a harsh reminder of a continent that is struggling to stay wild, protect it's national hertitage, and worse a heartbreaking reality of a species so close to the brink of extinction. 

ON SAFARI IN THE MOTOR A visitor records the wildlife in South Africa’s Kruger National Park in the 1930s. The sanctuary, which had been established as the Sabie Game Reserve in 1898 in an effort to stem the number of animals lost to hunting, was expanded northwards in 1926 to create a vast area in which the creatures could live in peace. There were as yet few roads. Today’s safari-goers are in general far more enlightened about etiquette in the wild, and would almost certainly not venture this close to such a predator without a guide. The photographer’s car is, we think, a late-1920s Fiat; one can only hope that the cameraman responsible for this picture was safely enclosed inside a second vehicle.