You sit under the scorching sun in middle of the jungle with a big camera in one hand and couple of more cameras with smaller lenses in another. Through the bumpiest roads and dusty paths, your jeep has traversed across all the possible roads of the jungle in a hope to find one beautiful wild cat.
No matter how much you pray and bribe the old gods and the new. No matter how expensive camera equipment you have got. No matter how good a naturalist you have got, the most likeliest outcome of this adventure is a dry safari with you returning to your camp with an empty SD card and a hopeless look.
To add salt to your injury, every other jeep in the jungle would have had the best sightings of their life.
Such is the game of wildlife photography. Lot of things should happen at the right time and in a right way to take one amazing shot.
To spot the big cat, you should hope that the crew in your vehicle have good enough ears to hear the alarm calls of deers and langurs. Once you hear the calls, you hope that your driver is good enough to know from where it is coming from and drives you to the right spot at the right time. When you reach on time, you hope that there are no other safari vehicles around with a crying kid to scare the animal off.
Even after all these events turned right, when the tiger finally comes out, all it shows is its butt. You can’t even decide whether or not to click the photo.
You blame the forest, its weather, the naturalist and the bad luck of fellow travellers and decide never to return to this god forsaken forest. Only to return to the same forest next day with brand new hope.
This game is all about patience and persistence.
Loopy Thoughts 