Grevy’s zebra I Equus grevyi

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…