What Are the Odds?

December 24, 2019

I’ve been sharing my ten most-liked photographs from 2019 over on social media, counting down to the final unveiling tomorrow (Christmas Day), but here’s an early reveal for my subscribers. My #1 Most-Liked Photo for all of 2019 is this image of Tira, the one-in-a-million genetically mutated zebra foal.

I started this blog with the intention of highlighting all ten images, but I got to thinking about all the pieces that had to fall in place to actually capture this image, and it led me down a mental detour. So my Top Ten feature is postponed until next week, and today’s post is devoted to Tira and what it takes to capture a photo like this.

As photographers, sometimes it is our privilege to be in just the right place at just the right time to capture something extraordinary and unexpected. We are afforded the great good fortune to not only witness a special moment but to be able to record that moment with our cameras, creating a memory indelibly frozen in time that can be shared with the world thanks to the magic of photography. Such is the story behind my #1 Most-Liked Image of 2019, titled ‘One in a Million’, that we were so fortunate to see and record during our Kenya visit.

Of course, as serendipitous as moments like this are, they cannot totally be chalked up to sheer luck. You can’t capture a photo of a zebra in Africa unless you actually go to Africa which requires days of travel logistics to get to and from. You can’t take a picture without a camera, and a good picture generally requires a good camera. Photographers spend significant amounts of money arming themselves with the best equipment and then suffer the physical wear and tear of schlepping all that gear around the world, usually weighing heavily on their backs. Then there are the uncivilized hours that afford the most beautiful light – before dawn mornings and evening sunsets when breakfast, dinner, and cocktail hour are all sacrificed in subservience to our craft. 

Even with all that groundwork invested in capturing that special moment, it still comes down to the most important ingredients of all to make that image sing: an artistic eye, knowledge of composition, and a level of skill encompassing the technicalities of photography.

And yet, still there is sheer luck. Just a week or so before we departed on our long-planned trip to Kenya, the national news organizations picked up the story of a newly born zebra foal with a startling stripe pattern. We soon realized he and his mother were in the Maasai Mara National Reserve, our destination. Nevertheless, the game reserve is nearly 600 square miles in size. What, we thought amongst ourselves, were the odds that we would be able to find this unique creature and capture it with our lenses? But we hoped, and we made it clear to our driver/guides that this baby zebra was at the top of our bucket list.

Sure enough, our knowledgeable guides took us right to him two days in a row, to photograph to our heart’s content. After those two days, we turned our attention to the pursuit of the many other wild creatures on our list. A week or so later, we heard that the zebra foal and his mother had crossed the river out of the game reserve and into Tanzania and the wilds of the Serengeti. What are the odds that a trip planned more than a year in advance would land us within photographic range of this unique creature during such a narrow window of time?

More about this special foal. He is nicknamed Tira, after Antony Tira, the Maasai guide who first spotted him. The majority of experts say that this unique coat color is a form of pseudomelanism, a genetic mutation that affects stripe pattern. Hopefully, Tira will grow to adulthood, but he faces challenges. He has clearly been accepted by his mother and into the herd, but his unusual coloring will cause him to stand out to predators, rather than camouflage him in a maze of stripes. It is also possible that he may be more vulnerable to disease-carrying biting flies, as one theory says that a zebra’s stripe pattern deters flies from landing on the host. All we can do is wish him well and be thankful that we were given the opportunity to see and photograph this very special animal in person.