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!

 

[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.