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The wild goes digital
By Vidushi Seneviratne and Tharangani Perera
“Despite digital photography having been used in various other photographic areas such as fashion designing and the print media, it has not been used in wildlife photography in Sri Lanka,” says Dr. Ravi Samarasinha, renowned wildlife enthusiast.

Ravi, along with Ifham Raji, will bring wildlife from Yala, Wilpattu and Horton Plains to the Harold Pieris Gallery, at the Lionel Wendt, through “Changing Times,” an exhibition of digital images which will be open to the public from August 11 to 13 from 9 a.m to 8 .pm.

A medical doctor by profession, Ravi Samarasinghe now completely devotes time and energy to wildlife conservation and has done extensive leopard research for over two years. He is also the co-author of “For the Leopard” and “Wilds of Lanka,” which is a photo cum information source. Ifham Raji heads his family business exporting precious stones and is involved in the hotel trade, while also being active in wildlife photography for over 20 years.

“Staying with the title of the exhibition, we hope to focus on the evolution of wildlife photography from film to digital,” said Ifham, adding that there are numerous advantages such as the standard and quality of a digital photograph, as opposed to one of film. Usually using Canon cameras, telephoto and image stabilization lenses, the duo obtains a sharper and clearer image of the principal object of the photograph.

“Generally, it is difficult to obtain a good photograph from a moving vehicle, and the image stabilization motor which is within the lens of the cameras we use, is a great help to produce a better photograph,” explained Ravi. An important feature of the exhibition is that they themselves have done all the image processing. Also, absolutely no manipulation has been done within the photographs and it is the basically the exact picture as the natural scene photographed,” says Ravi.

The images on display have been photographed within the span of one year.
The almost 115 images on display at the exhibition, will include photographs of leopards, deer, birds, reptiles, sceneries and macro images which are close-ups of insects, flowers and fruit. And which animal is the hardest to photograph? “Leopards are hard to find, but once you find them, it’s easy to photograph them since they stay in one place for a long time. But on the other hand, though there are birds all over, photographing them is extremely hard as they fly around a lot,” said Ravi.

Ifham and Ravi have launched their own website which is www.wildlifelanka.com, an image library that includes numerous film and digital photographs taken by them both. “By this website, we hope to publicize Sri Lankan wildlife images and make it available to anyone interested. We have so much to give to the world, and it’s important that something is done to give it its due place,” says Ifham. “Images can be purchased at the exhibition and if anyone needs extra copies of any of the photographs, this could be arranged as well,” says Ravi, adding that images could be purchased from the website too.

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