While not part of the famous "big 5" of African mammals, pound for pound African Wild Dogs (also called African Painted Wolves) are some of the most exciting animals you can still see in the wild. Highly social the packs can provide hours of entertainment for those lucky enough to find some of the very endangered animals...

On our most recent safari we were fortunate enough to have two wonderful game drives filled with the adventures of an unusually large pack of 21 dogs (including an even more unusual 12 pups from two different mothers) as they hunted, accidently discovered a hyena den, and fed each other after an Impala kill.
All this took place at one of my favorite camps, Chitabe in the Okavango Delta, part owned by Dave Hamman whose black and white wild dog photographs I've always admired. Inspired by the images now hanging in the remodeled tents there, and by the glorius black and white images that Mike Myers has used to decorate the Wilderness Safari offices in Johannesburg I decided to see if I could create an image that reflected that classic look.
I love black and white but except for my Infrared images I usually wind up using and printing the color versions of most of my wildlife images as I really like all the information color adds. So for this project I decided to use an image without much color--featuring a pair of darkly colored dogs on a sandy background. And by creating a stark contrast between the dogs and the sand in black and white I could use the bright background to my advantage. Rather than distracting from the subject as it might in a straight color print it could serve to frame the dogs. Also, in black and white the red meat the dogs are fighting over doesn't steal the show the way it might in a color version.

After opening the raw image I ran my standard "Noise Ninja & Raw Pre-sharpen" action and the result was a completely useable color image. Until recently the next step of giving the image a kind of classic or historic black and white look would have involved a lot of tweaking and brushing. Fortunately with SilverEfex Pro from nik I was able to simply apply the Holga preset to the image and have it pop into shape. The result is a black and white image that is much more striking than the original color one.--David