Flamingos at Lake Nakuru

The vast gathering of flamingos at Lake Nakuru in Kenya is one of nature’s great events. “The flamingos move up and down the Rift Valley, depending on where the conditions are best. When I was there a number of years ago, I learned that the concentrations of birds were exceptional at Nakuru, so I went there and it was extraordinary. Half the birds were standing or resting, and the other half were feeding on shrimp. That

gave me the idea to do a long exposure, to create an image where the stationary birds are relatively sharply defined and the feeding birds are very blurry. It worked out quite well here with a shutter speed that was probably about half a second.”

Frans created this image in the days of film, so wouldn’t have been able to gauge how successful this creative approach would be in the same way that you can with a digital camera. “This technique for deliberate blurring has become popular. I started experimenting with it early in my career, when it was a novelty, and a lot of editors thought it was a mistake, so would reject those images. But I think I helped contribute to making this technique part of the mainstream in wildlife photography, by showing what you could do if you really thought about it and created interesting images with blurs and swatches of colours instead.”