Adolescent Tiger

She was moving in dappled light. I was waiting for her to move into the lighted area.

Canon EOS 1 D Mark II, Canon EF 400mm f2.8 L IS USM, EF 2xII, ISO 200, f7.1, 1/250 sec, full frame.

Look forward to your comments.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

this is nice frame showing environment....where was this? you metered it spot, partial or evaluate? How about -1 stop exposure?Also I feel you can increase saturation little bit.
I know you dont like to crop but for better composition I would have less space at right side of image and move little bit closer.
Thanks for sharing.

Kiran,
This was at the end of about an hour of watching the Jhurjhura tigress and cubs.

I was using evaluative metering. I saw this adolescent wandering around and was ready to click when it came out into the light. I had checked the histogram that it was to the right. You can use Spot or evaluative or manual but you have to be sure about the tonal range that you want in the image. Just clicking with spot metering would have rendered the image darker. That would have given you more noise in the shadow areas. You can pull back during processing if you are shooting with the histogram more to the right and you will get less noise. I feel -1 stop would have rendered this too dark. I can reduce this by another 1/3rd stop but not further.

I wanted to show the background in focus. I used f7.1 that got nearly what I wanted. I would have been happy at a further narrow aperture but the shutter was only 1/250 and I didn't want it to go down. Actually, the guide and driver were excited and moving. So didn't want to take chances. :D

If you get the background darker, then it helps in eliminating lot of distracting vegetation. That is a plus point of dark backgrounds, but that would not have been an ideal representation.

As far as saturation is concerned, I haven't done any change to saturation. I checked and increasing saturation also works. The light was good, so didn't want to do any changes.

As far as the cropping is concerned, I dont want to crop as I want to push myself more in the field. If you crop a little bit from the right then the head of the tiger will come into the rule of thirds position. I didn't want to cut off the bamboo clump on the right, so composed this way. However, I checked again and find that it would work as well.

I had no way of moving closer. The only other way was to use a 1.6 crop camera. That would have helped in giving a tight portrait.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

Nice enviornment photograph. The light on the face of the tiger adds to the composition. The big stone at the foot of the tiger is a bit distracting, but cant change nature :-). Would have liked a bit less space in the foreground. Agree with Kiran a tighter framing would have worked as well.

I like this one. I think the stauration is fine although I to my tastes as well, I would have preferred a little more space to the right of the tigress.

Apana