Jungle Cat : Untold Stories of Savana!

[Rajbir Oberoi]

What you may mistake as grasslands can actually be a little being using those grasslands as their perfect hide-out. Zooming past in cars can make you miss what you look for most. On our second ride towards evening, our first target was to try for jungle cats, hyenas, wolves as they are most active either in wee hours of morning or late evening. We must have missed it completely had it not been for the expert eyes of our guide. Barely 10 seconds in hand to focus & click what we saw turned out to be difficult yet adventurous. She posed, walked, played to our tunes only later when we were able to disguise our presence making for a joyous sighting.

Canon 5d Mark III + Canon 100-400mm
AV mode, EV Metering
ISO 1250, F/5.6, 1/1600s, Handheld
Dec 2014

Blackbuck National Park, Velavadar, Gujarat

[Mrudul Godbole]

Lovely sighting of this elusive species. It is camouflaged so nicely against the grass in the background, tough to sight. I feel some more brightness would be good (not sure if it my monitor). Look forward to more from the series. Thanks for sharing.

[Abhishek Jamalabad]

Very nice. I like the composition with the cat in the centre of the grassland surroundings, though traditionally we prefer it off-centred. Needs a brightness boost to look even better.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Nice sighting. Image is too dark. The dark patches in the grass is distracting.

[Rajbir Oberoi]

have done a post processing again and opened up the brightness and shadow areas of the same...

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Restoring the brightness of the image makes it look better. However, the colour temperature appears to be pumped up. Did you specifically select a particular Kelvin (colour temperature) or presets while shooting? What time was it photographed?

[Rajbir Oberoi]

yes, i changed the WB to 6000, it was shot on 5200 WB while shooting and it was shot almost nearing sunset

[Sabyasachi Patra]

The reason I asked about colour temperature is that when you change it, natural colours goes for a toss and the image becomes mostly unusable for any natural history purpose. Colour variations of individuals across regions, if any, would be difficult to notice if you change the WB.

In wildlife photography, it is very important to keep your images natural. Too many wildlife photos, shot with proper techniques, having good sharpness, details and action fail to win because the photographers pump up the saturation or change white balance. Some of these tendencies is to show that the sighting happened in the warm glow of the morning or setting sun.

[Rajbir Oberoi]

Points noted Mr Patra :) will stop changing WB from now on and keep it as natural as possible :)

[Roopak Gangadharan]

Lovely sighting.... agree the contrast seems high in the second image . are there some blue streaks/ wires in the grass??
TFS
Roopak

[Vipin Sharma]

Very well camouflaged , hence becomes hard to spot .
It is indeed good that @1/1250 you managed to get shutter speed 1/1600 which lead the image to be sharper.
Nice image over all , I like the first original image posted by you as it clearly gives the feeling of late evening shot ; so as mentioned by you in details.
Nice image overall . TFS.

[Rajbir Oberoi]

thanks all people for your comments and critique, this will help me to better myself...

[Kaustuv Chatterjee]

Just try opening up the shadows and highlights a bit on your 1st shot and perhaps brightness after that by a couple or 4 pts max. Its important that the colours of the shot retain the capture of near perfect camouflage in your 1st shot...a very good sighting and must have been pure nervous energy to behold!