Photographing elephants is probably the most fun thing you can do as a wildlife photographer. It’s just so much fun to hide in clearings and watch them play, especially if they don’t care about you being there and they do their natural behavior. There are lots of dominance battles — and what’s really cool is watching two elephants about the same size really go at it. They don’t want to really fight, because they’ll injure each other, so they’ll spend the whole day trying to figure out an advantage. Literally, one will get on a mound of dirt that makes him a foot higher than the other guy, and he thinks he’s got it.

And then you see the way they play with the babies. Several times I’ve seen elephants introduce a newborn to the rest of the clan. An elephant family is small, maybe 6 or 7 sisters, but they know hundreds of other elephants, and at some point they introduce their baby to those guys. So they’ll come into a clearing, and they’re really protective but they let everybody get kind of a whiff. They won’t let anybody touch the baby. It’s incredible. The baby’s falling down all over itself — there’s nothing cuter than a baby elephant.

Technically, you’ve got to get that grey card reading again. Elephants will give you a different exposure depending on the mud they’ve been rolling in. You have to figure out how they are in relationship to gray that day.

Human smell, especially with elephants, is just impossible, because they’re so keyed in to scent. You’ve got to just confine your scent somehow, or else you work fast. You get one day of shooting in, and then you leave for two weeks. It’s a real problem. On this last Congo project, I got to the point where we were going to dip everything in elephant shit. We were going to run everything through big vats of it — the ropes, the camera gear, the clothing — but then I realized that I was going to sweat just walking out there and that would be enough. I ended up getting elephant pictures on a river, where I could float down at dawn really quietly and come up on them. And I don’t think of that as a permanent intrusion, because humans always come by river. Of course, our canoe got charged when we got too close. I thought the elephant didn’t even know we were there — his head was underwater — but it got a little bit out of hand (see “Elephant on the Mambili River,” right).

Some of my best pictures are of charging elephants. Elephants are hunted heavily where I work, so they’re afraid of humans, and if you get the right elephant, it’ll charge. But I think it’s almost always a bluff charge. I think a tiger would definitely find you and kill you, just because that’s what he wants to do. But an elephant just wants us to go away, so she trumpets and charges a little bit, which makes for a dramatic moment. Of course, there’s going to be the charge that’s real, and I’m not sure I can read that. I usually run away, which you’re not supposed to do. Mike Fay will stand his ground and stop the elephant by screaming at it. I tried that but I usually can’t handle it. But I go ahead and shoot the picture. I just don’t think about the fear at the time, and hope the elephant’s going to turn the right way.

Wherever you can find elephants and they’re habituated to Land Rovers, that’s good. There’s a water hole in Botswana called the Savuti, where Frans Lanting made a lot of his best pictures, and where the Jobert’s did a lot of their filming. Elephants are very accessible in the Masai Mara and in Amboseli where Cynthia Moss did her studies. They’re really huge there, and they’re used to Land Rovers.

There are some special spots, though, and I’m going to tell you where they are, because if you’re adventurous enough to get to them, you deserve to photograph there. The Dzanga clearing in southern Central African Republic is the mecca for forest elephants. You can photograph from 3pm to 5pm and there’s a miradour, a giant platform hide that the World Wildlife Fund built. But this place is difficult to get to. I would suggest contacting WWF if you want to shoot there. Odzala National Park in Northern Congo will become the serengeti of the rainforest, but it’s very difficult to get to, The elephants in Odzala are still really shy, but you can float that river I talked about.