Peter Menner Photo

Small owl, serious attitude — and a deliberate exposure trick behind that clean white backdrop.
This is a Pearl-spotted Owlet, despite the name one of the smallest owl species in Africa, barely the size of a fist. What it lacks in size it makes up for in expression — that stare is doing a lot of work in this frame.

Let's talk about the water in this one, because it's doing more work than the bird is.
This is a Hammerkop, standing in a stream in Kruger National Park. That smooth, silky look to the water isn't a filter or an editing trick — it comes straight from the shutter speed at capture: 1/8th of a second, which is unusually slow for a wildlife shot with a living, moving subject in it.
Camera Settings:
Canon EOS R5 | RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1L IS USM @ 128mm
f/9 | 1/8s | ISO 500
The tradeoff is real: at 1/8s, any movement from the bird blurs immediately. This shot only works because the Hammerkop held its head tucked and nearly motionless for that fraction of a second — long enough for the water to smear into motion while the bird itself stayed crisp. Miss that stillness by even a fraction and the whole frame falls apart.
It's a reminder that sometimes the technical risk (a slow shutter with a live subject) is exactly what makes a photo more interesting than the "safe" fast-shutter version would have been.
Would you have risked the slow shutter here, or played it safe?

Let's talk technique for a second.
This is a Cape buffalo — but you could argue the real subject of this photo is the darkness, not the animal. Almost the entire frame is black, and that's not a processing choice, it's an exposure choice made in the field.
When you shoot into low side light like this, your camera's metering system will try to "correctly" expose the shadows — which means lifting them, flattening the image, and losing the whole effect. The move here is to ignore that instinct completely: meter for the highlights only (the horn edges, the wet nose, the eye), and let everything else fall to pure black. What you get is a subject built entirely out of light, with the darkness doing as much work as the animal does.
It's a technique that rewards patience more than gear — you're waiting for the animal to turn its head into exactly the right angle relative to the light source, and you often only get one or two frames where it lines up.
Photographers — do you expose for shadows or highlights when you're working in low light like this? Curious how others approach it.

A water monitor ...
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