A bit of Barbary Lion

The best is I start with a thank you to Jim, who as Brad stated in one of his post, has created this gallery on my request. Because of that I would like to say a few words about why I motivated Jim and others to do so.

I started photographing in the early 80's and in 1988 I visited Kenya for the first time. From there on my wife and I for a long time stopped visiting zoos, since we felt the animals have to be free in the wilderness.

Anyhow if one lives in Germany, or many other Europen countries, wildlife is very shy and photography of it is very dificult. In many cases you even need special permission to make photos of wildlife in some of the national parks. The regulations are setup to avoid too much disturbance of the animals. Because of that in many cases as an enthusiastic hobby or semiprofesional photographer ( what I am according to german rules ), does not have a real chance to get in some areas to make photos.

That is very different to what I experience in USA, Australia, or Africa, where wildlife from my perspective is plenty available and quite easy to photograph. Just one example. In many years of hiking in our surounding forest I only have seen once wild red stags ( similar to wapitis in USA ), not a fox even when it is evident that they are there. In contrast, at my first visit to the Rocky Mountains NP in Colorado in one day I was able to photograph wapitis, ground squirrels, marmots, moose, and even a fox. I felt like being in paradaise ...

Because of the described situation here in Germany, I started to look for wild parks, smaller nature reserves, and zoos again to be able to make at least some photos and of course to stay trained, since I consider nature photography also to be like a sport; just think about all that weight we carry with us

It was during that visits to zoos, etc. that I realized that often these institutions do a lot for the conservation or rescue of endagered species and it was actually the posted photo that changed my opinion about captive kept animals.

The image is a scan of an ISO1000 film and that is why it looks a bit grainy or noisy. Anyhow it is not the quality of the image which is important to me, it is the fact that this species of lion is extinct in the wild. Even wrost, the animals that live in zoos probably do not have 100% of their original gens in it, but several zoos around the world have tried to rescue what was left from  some individuals that remained from the Maroc Royal Zoo.

When I made this image I was not aware of it, but was woundering about the beauty of the male, that has an impressive mane that extended even to the belly areas, which has characterized this species in the wild and let them look even more bigger as they are, altough they have been bigger as many other subspecies still living in the wild.

The image somehow makes me a happy on one site, since in this case the "Frankfurt Zoo", which was leaded many years by Bernhard Grzimek, probably Germany's best known nature photographer and film maker ( "Serengenti Shall Not Die" ), participated in a rescue programm in the mid 90's, ensuring that at least some animals are still alive. On the other hand it makes me also sad because the interaction shown is like many I have observed in the wild, but for this species it will never be seen like this anymore in the wilderness.

This example shows also that we humans have a big responsability in the conservation of nature and it is important that people, institutions, and other type of organization help to keep it.

That is where I see a benefit of this gallery also, which will allow us to post photos of the work others are doing to conserve nature and honor their work.

CONTAX RTS III, Sigma APO 5.6/400, F5.6, 1/500, handheld, manual focus, ISO1000 negative film

Scanned with NIKON Coolscan 5000ED, Photoshop curves, selective sharpening at the bodies, resizing, full frame