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 🙂
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Introduction not a reintroduction. We are not “reintroducing” a species that went extinct recently in India, instead we are “introducing” an alien predator in a habitat where they never ever existed.
I am not convinced that there was a wild population of cheetahs in India, that went extinct recently. There would have been cheetahs in Baluchistan but not in the present day India, at least not in the last few centuries.
Thousands of cheetahs were imported from Central Asia and Africa by the rich in India for over a 1000 years, mostly to be trained as “hunting leopards” for hunting or to be hunted down themselves
Cheetahs - an Introduction or Reintroduction. India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 forbids the introduction of exotic species to India’s wilds, even if they are genetically close to their Indian subspecies. It is illegal to even provide them with wild prey in captivity.
The cheetahs that we are getting are captive bred African cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus jubatus), a different sub species (or genetically different) from the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus). Therefore, it’s being called a “Reintroduction’ because Introduction is illegal
“Assessing the potential for reintroducing the cheetah in India”, a report from 2010 claims that 27 cheetahs could be sustained in the 347 sq. km of Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary. Kuno was a sanctuary at the time and half the present-day size of Kuno National Park.
05:11 pm Ranthambhore 23rd June 2022 - A tigress called Laila in Bhakola valley. We saw her sitting in a pool of water behind some bushes about half an hour ago. They s was the third or fourth picture I took, after she got up and started walking.
She crossed to our jeep’s left to spray mark a tree and then walked into a narrow entrance to a valley that widen up ahead. We drove on to park at where we thought we might catch up with her - a beautiful setting that tigers normally avoid.
Normally avoid - but today was an exception. I love these Rock formations and couldn’t believe she was walking through them.
Let me show you some ancient architecture from Ranthambhore national park on #WorldPhotographyDay
This building, same as the one in the previous picture, is known as the Choti (or small) Chattri, so called because there is a larger one nearby called (not very creatively) Badi (or big) chattri. It’s basically a elevated, dome-shaped pavilion with a Shivling under it
Then there is this one very close to Choti Chattri. The platform is still there but not the rest.
Been on safaris in Ranthambhore for two weeks now. When I started it was hot & the forest was dry. Hardly an colours except in the few evergreen groves along permanent water sources. Pictures had a brown background
Two days later it rained for a few hours which is a lot for us here. That totally transformed the forest. Water became available all over so the animals scattered across the forest. They now didn’t need to stay close to water holes. Water is everywhere
Once the predominant tree here - Anogeissus pendula or Dhonk as we call it locally - turns green, the number of animals that one sees in the lower reaches goes down drastically but the background becomes very interestingly green.