Tiger - Scent Marking Action!

[Praveen Siddannavar]

Shot this in Bandipur last weekend. Luck was not with me this time around, most of my pictures went off completely blank or under exposed, it was a big disaster. Neverthless I thought I must share the images and understand the mistakes I made on the field, hence sharing one of the scent marking actions of this male tiger.

I was told that this is the oldest male tiger at bandipur aged 10 or 11 years and has been named as "Agastya" previously known as F6.

Camera Model Name Canon EOS 40D
Shooting Date/Time 10/10/2009 5:24:45 PM
Tv (Shutter Speed) 1/500
Av (Aperture Value) 5.6
ISO Speed 800

[Mrudul Godbole]

Nice action captured. Some head turn in your direction would have enhanced the image further. Some more space all around would be good.

You are quite lucky to sight a tiger in Bandipur. I still have not photograph a tiger in South India. I have been trying for last 2 years :-( .

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Lovely sighting. Is this a big crop? If you can show us the original image before processing, we can identify the problem.

From the small file size I think the image is not sharp. The Zoombrowser software that comes with your camera will tell you where the focus point is.

[Bibhav Behera]

Lovely sighting... Agree with Sabyasachi and Mrudul about sharpness and space. The image seems a bit contrasty... Lovely behaviour captured...

[Praveen Siddannavar]

sure Sabyasachi I will email you few images in a while and let's discuss in the forum and fix the problems if possible. Few images that went off blank I tried recovery in photoshop and also installed the Lightroom 2 trial version, atleast I was able to see the face of the Tiger clearly:). But since I am still not familar with image post processing features in these tools probably your advise will be really valuable.
Thanks in advance for making this attempt.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Praveen mailed me the jpg images. I checked the focus point in Zoom browser software. The centre point AF was on. So it has picked up the lantana. However, in this case, the tiger was very close to the lantana and was positioned in a diagonal manner with its face away from us. So the hind part of the tiger is focussed as that is the plane of focus. Remember, Where ever the AF point falls, a plane parallel to the sensor remains in focus.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

I resized the image to 800pixels on the longest side. I think the original image was bigger than 200kb so the software resized it and the quality had gone down. I just imported the image into lightroom and I Increased the brightness by about 2/3rd stops. The spot metering mode was used. And there was a -1/3rd EC. So the image was a bit dark.

I would have loved it more if you could have clicked the actual scent spray.

[Praveen Siddannavar]

Thanks Sabyasachi, the image is much better now.