Big Cats

[Rob200sx]

Hi All,

As part of a dslr user meet I went to the Cat Survival Trust near Welwyn yesterday (it's about a mile from the Santago Leopard Project). Was a great day and the cats were fantastic. Here's a few pics.

1) Jaguar, she's got fed up with visitors over time so it was very hard to get a shot of her being still.

2) Armur Leopard, it's estimated that there are around 40 females left in the wild so this was quite a rare animal indeed

3) Snow Leopard, great animals, very peaceful (but then most are until they decide you're lunch ) and great in front of the camera.

4) Another Snow Leopard, seemed quite happy to pose

All were taken with the Sigma 70-300mm on a Canon 400D.
I learned quite a lot throughout the day about photographing them, mainly to take note of the histogram and adjust the +/-EV accordingly. It was a sunny day so the white of the fur could easily get blown out. I'd previously not paid too much attention to the histogram!

 

[Youstolemyname]

Im in a similar situation to you mate- just learning. What would I do with the histogram?

I have the same camera as you but a 55-250 IS lens and was struggling to shoot sunsets last night without the sky being completely blown out

 

[Scam]

Im in a similar situation to you mate- just learning. What would I do with the histogram?

Google for links relating to 'understanding camera histogram' or something. Here's one just quickly. There's a lot of reading you can do, but essentially you want to make sure nothing is getting clipped off either edge or the top. As for your sunsets, you were probably exposing too much for the foreground, and as such the sun will get over-exposed. You'll have to manually expose somewhere inbetween the two, or probably more so for the sun.

Rob200sx. Your shots are good but the first thing that strokes me is that they're all quite under-exposed. They all need lifting up a bit. 2, 3 and 4 are also a bit soft and need some sharpening. 4 needs straightening too (although i see it will be a pain because the wall line doesnt line up with the table thing it's lying on). I think 3 has the most potential if you do some work processing it. It's a good crop.

 

[RandomTom]

Check out that tail! Great set of images; nice subject and they're all incredibly well detailed which I like, very sharp.

 

[Rob200sx]

Thanks for the input, I'm going to work on the processing a little more, no 4 has turned out to be my favourite, none of the pics are sharpened but they're at 75% jpg quality so both reasons may explain why they may look a little soft. I've dropped the exposre in PP and then adjusted the blacks & fill lighting to hide as much of the wire as possible whilst trying not to keep it too dark, I was shooting through a 2" wire and I found that adjusting as above removed the 'foggy' blur of the wire. I'll have a go at brightening them up though.

youstolemyname:
as Scam has said, you need to avoid clipping at either ends of the histogram, if it clips at the right side then apply some -EV, if it clips at the left, then apply +EV, this worked for me. There's a good article about it in this months Digital Photographer magazine.