Wisent II Bison bonasus

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.