Cheetah I Acinonyx jubatus

I really like visiting zoos in bad weather. Well, maybe not bad weather exactly — I hate trying to take photos on a windy, rainy day — but at least weather which provides the opportunity to photograph the animals in situations different from the norm. Snow is always good for this, being unusual enough in most parts of the UK to provide interest. And fog — as here — is another.

An added bonus is that the ‘interesting’ weather generally puts off a lot of people from visiting zoos. Not that I hate people, you understand, but it does allow a little more flexibility, enabling me to move the camera quickly to the optimum position between shots without obstructing fellow visitors.

On this particular late November day in 2014, the fog had been quite thick when I arrived, and I’d already stopped by the rhino and sitatunga paddocks and captured some ethereal, almost abstract shots of their shapes on the horizon. It was a little less misty when I arrived at the cheetah enclosure, and a couple of animals were out near the viewing area next to the main perimeter road. One was lying on the grass, and with careful positioning I was able to get what I thought were some nice shots from low down, with direct eye contact. However, looking at them later on the computer, I realised that the camera angle had foreshortened the cheetah’s front legs to the point where they looked somewhat odd.

The second individual was wandering around, and suddenly hopped up onto a tree bough which had been inserted into the ground in the enclosure.

From this position, there’s no option but to shoot through a wire fence, and, with the fence in question being around 2m away, I set the aperture to the maximum available — f/4 — on my 70-200mm zoom, in the hope that any wire strands would be thrown so far out of focus so as to be invisible (or, at least, non-distracting). ISO 640 gave a high shutter speed to deal with any subject or camera movement. I was leaning over one low fence to get the camera as close as possible to the main fence, although it was still a good few feet away.

I held the camera as low as possible (I use a right-angle viewfinder attachment for this, as my camera — a Canon 5D Mark II in this instance — doesn’t have a flip-out rear screen facility). This meant that I could position the whole of the cheetah against the grey sky and out-of-focus hedge in the background, and not have it half-and-half aginst the grass and the hedge

I shot a couple of frames while it scanned around, and then another two as it looked towards the ground and the jumped down to rejoin its companion.

image edit

Two of the four shots looked ok: one where the cheetah was looking downwards, and this one where it is looking out of the enclosure towards the zebra paddock. This is probably my favourite, as it shows the eyes quite well.

Cheetah I (prior to edit)

The tree/branch was proving quite troublesome to deal with effectively, but in the end I settled on an agreeable composition. I wanted the cheetah to be looking into the frame — this meant dealing with the upright boughs on the left. I’ve settled on a crop where the uppermost branch of the ‘V’ in the bough intersects the corner of the frame. I also moved the crop inwards on both sides, so that none of the branch ends were visible, and excluded the lower branch, and the small tree jutting into the top right of frame, completely.  All of that meant that I ended up with a roughly 50% crop, but to me, it just looks more ‘correct’ than any of the other options I tried. The heavier branches on the left, I feel, balance the cheetah and branch on the right. My Photoshop skills are not up to removing the central branch though!

I’ve increased the saturation and contrast of the various elements, the foreground more so than the background, in order to increase subject separation from the defocussed grass and hedge. I’ve also increased the shadow detail of the foreground branches, as I quite like the lichen and bark details. The tree in the right midground is still a little distracting, but I think it’s just about far enough out of focus and fog-enshrouded to not cause too many issues.