Post category – Mammals > Ungulates

Kobus ellipsiprymnus

Common waterbuck I Kobus ellipsiprymnus ellipsiprymnus

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A small herd of common (or ellipsen) waterbuck — all females — currently share a large paddock with Grevy’s zebra at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo.

This shot was taken on a cold day in early March. The other herd members had chosen to stay in or near to their housing block, but this individual was walking around in the main paddock, quite close to the fence. Often the waterbuck will take off towards the centre of the paddock when someone approaches, but this female chose to stand still whilst I slowly drew nearer. She watched me intently as I crouched down, partly behind a bush, into a position which enabled me to juxtapose her head and the upper half of her body against the sky.

She was close enough that a moderate telephoto setting of 121mm on my 70-200mm zoom sufficed; this allowed the inclusion of some foreground and sky to frame the animal. Unless I’m going for a particular effect, I try to include more space around the subject, when shooting, than seems natural. I often used to zoom in as far as I could, making the maximum use of the range of any zoom lens, but would often find later that I’d not left enough room to allow for things such as straightening wonky horizons, giving the subject ‘looking into’ or ‘walking into’ space, and so on. The subject would look far too ‘confined’ or claustrophobic within a tight frame — nowadays I much prefer to give them space to breathe.

There is still some overexposure in the sky. I guess I could’ve shot a bracketed sequence of shots at various exposures and then combined them together on the computer — this would probably have worked ok, as the subject was fairly stationary. However, I didn’t know how long she would stand in that position at the time, and I didn’t have time to seek out the autobracketing function on my camera, so just went with the single shot approach. Actually this was the best of around half-a-dozen similar shots; making sure that I’d captured the right expression, with both ears forward, and ensuring that all four of her legs were visible. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve captured what I thought was a great shot, only to later discover that I’ve instead photographed what appears to be a three-legged animal, or one which has one ear forward and the other back (which just looks odd).

image edit

As you can see from the original, I didn’t increase the exposure to correctly expose the main subject, as I wanted to retain detail in the sky:

Common waterbuck I (prior to edit)

Being also a landscape photographer, I’m really not a fan of cloudless skies; this has carried over into my zoo photography, which I find often combines elements of landscape photography with pure ‘animal’ photography. In this case, I liked the cloudy sky (luckily, here in the UK, we get a lot of skies like this!) and wanted to make a feature of it.

Even so, I still overexposed the sky a little, as there are some burnt-out patches in the brightest areas, but I’m ok with that. I did bring the other highlights down in Lightroom though (-85 on the scale).

Other Lightroom edits included a large increase in Shadows (+73, to counter the underexposure) and Whites (+49), and a negative setting to deepen the Blacks (-35). A small increase on the Vibrance slider of +7, and finally a slight vignette (-11, feathered).

I left the crop exactly as taken; there is a slight distraction in that the zebra housing can be seen in the left background, but I’ve decided to leave it visible for now.

Technical

f/6.3

aperture


1/1600s

shutter


400

iso


121mm

focal length


Kobus ellipsiprymnus

Grevy’s zebra I Equus grevyi

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This is another shot from a few years ago, taken on a very cold and foggy February afternoon. With snow having fallen a day or two earlier, and freezing temperatures since, there was still plenty of snow on the ground up at Whipsnade, although thankfully the steep approach roads were clear.

There is a grassy ridge in the large zebra paddock at Whipsnade, just opposite the giraffe enclosure. On this occasion, its exposed nature meant that there were still a few blades of grass showing, unlike the rest of the paddock which was blanketed white.

The Grevy’s zebra were out in the paddock. This mare climbed up and walked along the ridgetop, nibbling at the sparse blades of grass. I took a few long shots of her grazing, but then she moved forward, stopped, and momentarily stretched her hind leg rearward. That was enough to make the shot ‘interesting’ (to me, at least!).

This was taken with a 70-200mm zoom lens, on a Canon 5D Mark II camera. I’d also fitted a 1.4x converter. The 70-200 is my ‘walkaround’ lens at most zoos (although usually without the converter, as it has a tendency to degrade the image slightly). I keep the aperture set around f/5.6-f/8, which generally gives me enough separation between subject and background at the typical shooting distances found in these situations, but still gives a reasonable depth of field on the subject. I’d set the ISO high enough to give a hand-holdable shutter speed, even at the longer end of the zoom range.

image edit

Back in the digital darkroom, I realised how badly I’d framed and exposed the shot:

Grevy’s zebra I (prior to edit)

Of course, I’d forgotten that snow (and a white sky) means that an exposure compensation of around +1 or +2 stops is usually necessary to render the snow as white in-camera, rather than the murky grey seen here!

I could’ve just binned the image there and then. However, I look closer and cropped the image down to around half of the original, straightening it in the process. Had it not been a relatively spur-of-the-moment shot, I would’ve had time to zoom in further at the time of shooting: as it was, I had less than a second to get the shot.

After cloning out a couple of distracting twigs from the foreground, I did a quick monochrome conversion, upping the exposure and foreground contrast in the process. The background trees became much less noticeable when I’d finished.

Now it looked much better. Ideally I’d have liked her to have walked a little closer to the crest of the ridge, so that all her hooves were visible. But overall I’m quite happy with the shot. I like the graphic, high key feel, and the fog (and edit) has made the background trees less of a distraction than they might otherwise have been. Finally, that outstretched leg provided the extra bit of interest…

Technical

f/7.1

aperture


1/320s

shutter


400

iso


225mm

focal length


Wisent II Bison bonasus

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This shot was taken back in 2012, on a bitterly cold and foggy February morning. I’d arranged, a few days earlier, to meet up with a photographer friend at Whipsnade on this particular weekend; and, although we’d thought about postponing the trip, we went ahead in the end. I’m really glad we did. We don’t often get a lot of snow in this part of the country, so it was quite a novelty (possibly for the animals too), and produced interesting sets of photos for both of us.

I’ve no idea why, but I almost always turn right upon entering a zoo. Thus we ended up going round the park in an anticlockwise direction. With this being Whipsnade, it meant that some of the first animals we came across were the small herd of European bison, also known as wisent.

Normally the bison stay well out towards the centre of their paddock. However, with a layer of snow carpeting it, and with us being two of very few visitors braving the weather that day, they were more interested in us than usual; presumably hoping that we’d brought food along (sadly, we had no bison fodder with us).

These two wandered over to the iron fencing where we stood, and we were able to spend several minutes photographing them from close range. It’s not often that I get to use a wideangle lens for animal shots, although I nearly always carry a 17-40mm zoom with me. Such a lens is always handy for record shots which show a whole enclosure, not to mention the occasional landscape shot — particularly so at Whipsnade with its stunning location.

We both took many shots of these two, at distances ranging from around 10m down to (with care!) just a few cm, before switching to our usual telephotos to capture some of the other individuals which had stayed further out in the enclosure.

I’ve chosen this shot, as I liked the position of the two bison, and particularly the head of the right-hand individual and its sideways glance. The short focal length has emphasized the heads of both animals, and I feel that this, combined with a fairly low shooting position, has increased their ‘majesty’ (for want of a better word). The thick fog has effectively removed any distracting background elements — fences, hedges, trees — which would normally be visible in shots at this location.

image edit

As for post-processing: the shot is about an 80% crop of the whole frame:

Wisent II (prior to edit)

The crop also straightened the shot, although I still had to clone out a small portion of iron railing which intruded into the bottom right corner of the cropped image.

I’ve lifted the shadows quite a bit, and brightened the whites (possibly too much); added a little Clarity and upped the Vibrance in Lightroom.

As you can see, as well as a couple of small branches and hoofprints, and a bit of vegetation attached to a horn, I’ve also cloned out another bison from the central background, caught in quite an, er.. “interesting” pose! I may yet do another version with that animal included.

Technical

f/7.1

aperture


1/160s

shutter


400

iso


17mm

focal length


Wisent I Bison bonasus

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A shot taken during a winter visit to ZSL Whipsnade Zoo in southern England. There had been some snowfall a day or two prior to my visit. The elevated position of the park meant that the snow was still plentiful on the ground when I arrived, and there was a very dense fog.

Consequently, it was quite easy to get a clean background — at other times of the year I’m often looking around for alternative viewpoints, trying to minimise the impact of an ugly tree / fence / hedge / building which is intruding into the background of a shot. With snow and fog combined, there was much more freedom to compose the subject, with a plain or near-plain background available at almost all shooting angles.

With this shot of one of the small herd of European bison (wisent), I was able to shoot from a near standing position; keeping the subject to the right, a wide lens meant that, even though I was close to the subject, I could also include a portion of the snow-covered paddock.

I chose to exclude the main identifying features (the horns) on this particular shot, concentrating on the eye and beard.

image edit

I’d framed the shot in-camera in portrait format:

Wisent I (prior to edit)

Initial edits included correcting the underexposure and boosting the shadow detail, as well as adding Vibrance and some Clarity in Lightroom to lift the subject out of the thick fog. The whites were brightened in order to bleach out the background completely, giving an almost “studio” feel to the shot.

Feeling that the original shot was somewhat ‘cramped’, I then opened it in Photoshop, checked that the whites were indeed pure white, and then added a chunk of additional plain white background to the left of the subject, making it look as if the bison was peering in from the edge of the frame.

Technical

f/7.1

aperture


1/160s

shutter


400

iso


17mm

focal length