Amur tiger I Panthera tigris altaica

I’d never really had much luck photographing the tigers at Whipsnade. I have a whole heap of very average pictures of them, taken over the past five years or so. I think it’s partly to do with that fact that I’d usually visited at fairly busy times, and ‘sharing’ the experience with several tens or even hundreds of other people means that it’s difficult to catch that moment where you have direct eye contact. This time, however, was different…

I’d been at the Zoo for several hours, on a cold, foggy day last November. It was mid-afternoon, normally a busy time on any reasonably nice day, but on this occasion the poor weather meant that I was almost the only person at Tiger Falls, the fantastic Whipsnade exhibit housing a pair of Amur, or Siberian, tigers.

Anastasia, the female, was resting on the uppermost platform at the lower end of the exhibit, from where she was keeping a close eye on the much younger male, Botzman, as he patrolled the enclosure below.

I headed for the two large, glass viewing windows on the lower path which skirts the south side of the exhibit, right next to the pond at the foot of the aforementioned ‘falls’. I’d had the occasional ‘ok’ shot from here on previous visits, as one or other of the tigers made their way downhill from their housing/den area, providing a brief face-on view. Although, to be honest, I needed a longer lens for that particular shot: my 70-200mm handles most subjects pretty well in a typical zoo situation, but there are definitely occasions when the extra reach of something like a 400mm would be very welcome.

However, I persevered and tracked Botzman around the enclosure, waiting for an opportune moment. Nothing much was happening though: the couple on the far side of the enclosure had wandered off, so now it was just Botzman and me, with Ana having settled down for a snooze on her lofty lookout post. As the big male headed across to the far side of the exhibit, I thought it would be a good opportunity to grab a makeshift lenshood from my camera backpack, which I’d earlier placed on the ground by my feet. The lenshood, made from a rectangle of thin black foam sheeting picked up from a craft shop, and held onto the lens with a piece of garden wire, serves to minimise the effect of reflections when shooting through glass. It’s a lot more flexible than the standard hood supplied with the lens, and can be moulded to a suitable shape to combat reflections at almost any angle.

So, I’m crouched down next to my camera bag, fishing around for said piece of foam and length of garden wire; whilst all the time keeping half an eye on the enclosure. I reckoned I’d got plenty of time before Botzman came closer again. However, I hadn’t anticipated what happened next: Botzman looked up from his casual explorations and suddenly caught sight of me.

I was still crouched down, most of my body obscured beneath the lower edge of the window, and with a hat on as it was pretty cold. So I’m guessing that, from his perspective, I probably looked potentially snack-sized and worthy of immediate investigation. Maybe I look like a chicken? Who knows. Anyway, suddenly I became the most interesting thing in his world, and he started heading directly across the enclosure towards me: not quite running, but at a brisk, purposeful walking pace, eyes fixed in my direction.

Eye contact with the big cats always manages to take my breath away. I’d only experienced it for fleeting moments with the Whipsnade tigers previously; this time, however, I had Botzman’s full and undivided attention for what seemed like ages.

It took me a second or so to fully register what was happening, and then some sort of photographic instinct kicked in; I dropped the lenshood, and quickly raised the camera into position. I was still crouched down at this point, but this was perfect as the camera was then at tiger eye-level as he got nearer. Also, had I stood up, I guess my (unintentional) ruse would’ve been discovered, and he’d have lost interest immediately.

It had been foggy all morning, and thickly overcast all afternoon. So the light levels generally were pretty low, and things locally were even worse, as I was effectively crouched down in a north-facing hollow in a lightly wooded area of the Zoo. But even so, the Canon 5D Mark III autofocus snapped onto Botzman’s face almost instantly, and tracked focus as he carried on approaching. I fired off just four shots as he headed directly towards me. For some reason, I still haven’t got into the habit of holding my finger down on the shutter button and letting the camera ‘machine-gun’ 20 or so shots by itself  — I guess it’s something to do with my previous cameras having a fairly pedestrian continuous frame rate, which in turn meant a high likelihood of missing that ‘decisive moment’. The 5D3 is much better in this regard, and it’s something I need to experiment with.

With the light being so poor, I’d set a high ISO of 3200 as I’d approached the exhibit earlier, together with a wide aperture of f/5 which I figured would keep shutter speeds fast enough for successful handheld shots at 200mm. ISO 3200 is as high as I would generally go on the 5D3, although I have had usable shots all the way up to the 25,600 setting on occasion.

image edit

Back on the computer, I chose this particular shot of the four — I liked the position of the leading foreleg, the fact that the tail can be seen, and of course the amazing eye-contact.

Amur tiger I (prior to edit)

I’m still undecided though, on the best way to process the photo. I’ve tried several options including portrait, landscape and square crops, leaving the background trees and bushes more visible, or darkening them. For this version, I’ve gone for a more heavily-processed look, which starts with a 50% cropped landscape format, with the subject positioned quite far to the left of centre, ‘walking into’ the space on the right. I’ve applied a heavy dose of contrast and quite a bit of Vibrance in Lightroom, and then taken the cropped and part-edited shot into Viveza, one of the Google Nik Collection plugins, which allowed me to selectively adjust the brightness, hue, saturation of the background versus the main subject. I chose to darken the background right down, which simultaneously created the effect of a pool of light just behind the tiger.

Cloning of distractions was minimal: just a couple of bits of brightly-lit twiggery in the bushes behind the tiger, and similarly a blade of grass or two from the foreground.

I realise that parts of the tiger are now seriously overexposed, and I may yet have another go at it, but, for the moment, I’m reasonably happy with this version.