unny Elephant photo: An elephant gives Photographer John Lund a head massage.

Funny Elephant photo: An elephant gives Photographer John Lund a head massage.

While photographing an elephant in Thailand I paused to get a little head massage...ugh! Slimy! Weird! I do love elephants though...big, lumbering, strong and seemingly gentle elephants! The bigger the better!

Photographing Elephants in Thailand

Thailand is a great place to photograph elephants...very inexpensive. I was able to "rent" an elephant for a half a day for my photography for $450.00. That is one tenth what it would cost me here in the U.S., and probably with a lot less restrictions either. In order to facilitate the kind of imaging I do, creating new photographic realities with the help of liberal doses of Photoshop, I needed to shoot the elephants in relatively flat lighting. I achieve that by hiring a local film crew who brought a 20 x 20 foot silk, in a large frame, which we positioned between the sun and the elephant. For most of the pictures I had the filtered sun at my back. That lighting meant that I could rotate, flip and merge various portions of the elephants' anatomy with abandon and not worry about the quantity and quality of light. Photographing the elephant with filtered sunlight greatly facilitated my series of funny elephant pictures.