Elephants in focus

Another attempt at focus stacking, this time rather more ambitious and involving not just one, but a whole herd of elephants. The smallest is only 1 cm tall, so best seen zoomified. Again they are Indian elephants, carved in the days of the British Raj and brought back by returning colonial officials, army officers, tea-planters and the like as mementoes of more exotic times.

Indian elephants can be domesticated and were widely used for transport and as beasts of burden. In Kipling's Toomai of the Elephants an old working elephant looks back to his youth:

I will remember what I was, I am sick of rope and chain-
I will remember my old strength and all my forest affairs.
I will not sell my back to man for a bundle of sugar-cane:
I will go out to my own kind, and the wood-folk in their lairs.
I will go out until the day, until the morning break-
Out to the wind's untainted kiss, the water's clean caress;
I will forget my ankle-ring and snap my picket stake.
I will revisit my lost loves, and playmates masterless!

Toomai of the Elephants. Rudyard Kipling.