Common waterbuck I Kobus ellipsiprymnus ellipsiprymnus

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.