Kopjes

The Serengeti is not entirely flat. It is broken here and there by kopjes, piles of old granite left standing as the softer ground wore down around them, and they change everything near them: shade, shelter, a vantage point, a place for things to grow that the open plain will not carry.

Out beyond the rocks a grass fire was working along the horizon, a low line of smoke doing what fire does out here on its own schedule. The rocks and the fire are the two things that shape this landscape, one slow, one fast.

All on the 135, ISO 200 to 400. Worth photographing for themselves, and worth watching, because a kopje is exactly where a leopard or a lion is likely to already be sitting, above the plain and out of the grass.