Pachyderm Periscope

I wasn't looking for elephants when I made this photograph.

I was in Yala National Park searching for leopards when I came across a male elephant wallowing in a lake. Almost his entire body had disappeared beneath the water, leaving little more than the tip of his trunk and part of one ear visible above the surface.

Every few minutes, the trunk would disappear before slowly rising again - breaking the surface like a periscope as he breathed.

He stayed there for close to an hour.

What made the encounter even more memorable was the occasional movement of his ear above the water, seemingly keeping track of the sounds around him while Hanuman langurs called from the surrounding forest.

From a distance, one of the largest animals on Earth had almost completely vanished.

Pachyderm Periscope is a photograph about that contrast - the enormous reduced to the smallest of details, and an encounter I found only because I happened to be looking for something else.