Thread by @adityadickysin

Just a random thread on photographing tigers in the wild. Rule number one - photographs are all & only about light. There are no other rules rules as such.

Don’t do this ever - try to stay low that all my fight is about. Why would I stand up 🤦🏽‍♂️ Stay as low as possible generally speaking. That means parking the vehicle accordingly as you can’t get lower than the floor of your vehicle

Eye contact is cool, approaching the camera is cool. Wait for one of the leg to move ahead - step out. Don’t ever rely on the cameras motor drive to ‘get it all’ as it can’t possibly do that. Timing is very important

But no eye contact can be very cool too. You need to get close. Powerful telephoto can ‘frame tighter’ but you need to get reasonably close. Otherwise the atmospheric dust messes it up

Heck if the background is interesting tigers walking away can look super cool

As far as possible frame behaviour tightly. In other words keep as much of crap out of the picture as you can and just focus on the behaviour part.

Head shots are cool looking especially on small screens and on social media. Head shots should be head shots - at the most a bit if the shoulder. One third of a tiger is not a head shot

But slightly wider shots that show the cat in its natural habitat are just wow. They may not look so cool on social media but these are the ones I would print. When shooting these keep the background in mind. Don’t cut the bloody tree 🙂

Finally if you get to see something like this - forget all the other pointers I have mentioned - the low angle, eye contact, background etc etc. Just keep them all in frame whenever possible and don’t fuck up. Like I said there are no rules 🙂