Honorable Mention
Weighing Her Options
DESCRIPTION
On safari in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, our guide led us to an exhausted cheetah and a gazelle a few feet from her. We waited about an hour alone with the cheetah before she fed on her prey, an extremely rare site. She had expended all of her energy tracking down, chasing and killing. As time went by, vultures circled overhead. She knew it was now or never to eat, because after the airborne scavengers arrived, hyenas will soon follow.
She took a bite, then another. It was the only time we saw the gazelle move, shaking in the tall, blood stained grass of the savanna.
Crouched as low as I could in our Land Cruiser, I took this photo with a 300mm lens through an open window that was approximately a meter from the ground.
The cheetah looked up at me for a second, stared and continued to eat. Our guide told us it was time to leave.
Weeks after we returned home and started editing, this one frame haunted me. At the time I made this image I was in the moment, completely focused on shutter speeds, apertures and focal lengths. Our guide knew otherwise, we were becoming a food option.
AUTHOR
Jonathan William Cohen has been producing fine art, photojournalistic, and commercial photography for nearly thirty years. He earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts Degree in Photography from the University of Connecticut in 1996, where he became versatile in historical processes, traditional darkroom development and printmaking, and digital photography, digital archive management and audio and video editing.After graduation, Cohen worked as a staff photographer for The Sandpaper, the Press of Atlantic City, The Times of Trenton, and The Courier of Houma, Louisiana. He also served as a freelance photojournalist for the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Fisherman magazine. He is an alumnus of both the Eddie Adams Workshop and The Western Kentucky University Mountain Workshops, and is currently the University Photographer for Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.
In his spare time, Cohen and his spouse Rhonda Branca travel around the U.S. and the world to learn about different cultures and, of course, take many photographs.
