For professional photographers, no invitation is as freighted as "Why not come by and take some pictures?" Sounds innocent enough, but there's no telling where it might lead and how the trail will twist and turn.

For instance...

In August, 2008, Carol Stevenson, whose work includes landscape, portrait and documentary photography, was working on a project in Queensland, Australia, where she met up with a friend who's in the hotel business. He recommended her to a friend of his who was working at a boutique hotel in the area in which she'd soon be shooting. When she met him, it turned out they shared an interest in, and concern for, elephants.

"He had just come from being the manager of the Four Seasons Tented Camp in Thailand," Carol says. The Tented Camp is not only a resort hotel, it's also somewhat of an elephant refuge. On its grounds are elephants rescued from the streets of Bangkok and other cities in Thailand. The Tented Camp's former manager suggested that Carol might be interested in documenting the elephants, and he offered an introduction to the man who is the director of elephants for the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation (GTAEF), an organization that works on behalf of the welfare of Asian elephants.

As Carol made the connections and did the research, she found that in addition to the Tented Camp, another hotel, the Anantara Golden Triangle Resort, was also supporting the effort and providing land for the elephants. Carol also found that GTAEF and the hotels do more than just offer a safe haven.

In Thailand, bans on the traditional use of elephants for transportation and logging had left the mahouts—the elephant owners and handlers who depend on the elephants for their livelihoods—with few opportunities. "So they became beggars on the streets or tried to make a living through tourism," Carol says. Neither was a good situation for the elephants. "The GTAEF provides the mahouts with a complete replacement income and lifestyle so they don't have to beg on the streets.

The hotels provide, in fact, working camps for the elephants and the mahouts. "There are elephant treks with the tourists," Carol says, "and even mahout training—the tourists learn how to be mahouts; they learn how to get up on an elephant, and they're taught the commands. It's something the people love to do. And the elephants will get all the food and water they need, the mahouts get food for their families, a small salaries and their children attend school."      

It was the GTAEF's director of elephants who issued the invitation to Carol: "Why not come by and take some pictures?"

Because of prior commitments and planning, it took Carol a year to get to Thailand. "They didn't have anything specific in mind for me when they invited me—nothing more than maybe I'd do a personal project that would benefit the foundation. But I came up with a way to differentiate the project."

The idea was to go big. Take close-up images of the elephants, then make huge prints. "I had this vision of an exhibition of prints that measured four by five feet," Carol says.     

At the resort hotels Carol saw the relationship of the mahouts and the elephants, and the big job got even bigger as she envisioned a series of portraits. Which required sewing four hotel sheets together and putting them up on a bamboo frame to make an outdoor backdrop suitable for 13-foot-tall subjects. It also required an extraordinary effort to photograph some 30 elephants in three locations within the 12 days she'd allowed. "That was plenty of time for close-ups, but not for portraits too. It became a race." 

Carol had brought along two Nikon D-SLRs—her D3 and a D3x on loan from Nikon Professional Services (NPS). "Once I had the idea of huge prints, I thought I'd have to move to medium format to get the file size I'd need. But photographers I talked to said no, don't do it; stay with the format you know. I've always been a Nikon shooter, so I did some research and realized the D3X would give me what I needed. So I made a proposal to NPS and got the D3X to use for the project." 

She used three lenses for the images: AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED, an AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED and an AF Micro-NIKKOR 60mm f/2.8D. She shot under natural light, with SB-800 and SB-600 Speedlights and with location strobes. "The lighting was a challenge. It went from bright outdoor light to the elephants in low light under a barn-like structure." For each portrait—some taken with the cameras set for black-and-white, others converted in post-processing—she shot up to a hundred exposures. "Then I chose the images that spoke the most about the relationship between the mahouts and the elephants." 

The D3X delivered everything she'd hoped for. "It was fantastic in terms of reproduction and interpretation of color and the level of detail and sharpness in the images." 

And it's likely to keep on delivering. Carol has access to the elephants for a total of five years, so the project is ongoing. While she's currently working on making an international exhibit a reality, she's also planning a return visit to Thailand.

After all, the invitation to "come by and take some pictures" still stands. 

Carol's website, www.stevensonimages.com, features a variety of her photographs. Her website for the Elephants & Mahouts project is at www.elephantphotographer.com, where you can view still images as well as a video of Carol at work in Thailand. The site for the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation is www.helpingelephants.org.