Future King

[Tanmay Mehendale]

This fella is a Mallu/Ballu, brother of kallu from mirchani. Hope u liked it. All C&C are welcome...

[Mrudul Godbole]

Hi Tanmay,

Perfect first post.

Sharp image. Liked the eye contact and the stride.Nice composition. Please do post the equipment and EXIF details.

Look forward to more..

[Bibhav Behera]

Hi Tanmay,
A good first post. I like the lighting and the eye contact. Feel you could have slightly given a bit more exposure to this image...

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Hi Tanmay,
Welcome to IndiaWilds!

Its great to see a tiger as a first post.

Since I don't find the ISO, shutter speed, aperture, camera and lens details, I will restrict my comments to compositional aspects and post processing.

I like the composition. You have used a low angle to photograph this one and that makes the photo good. It is also good that you haven't clipped the tail. I also like the pose and the looks. The image appears to be sharp.

I don't agree with the post processing. Are you shooting in RAW or jpeg?

After importing the RAW file the first step is to look at the white balance of the image. I use lightroom and use the eyedropper tool to select a gray tone. One can use the presets like auto, daylight etc as a starting point as well. In my initial days, I was doing the mistake of artificially warming up the colour temperature (white balance) to make the image appear as if it is taken in golden light. I have ruined lots of shots like that during the initial days of digital. In your image, the colour of the coat of the tiger is not realistic. It looks more orange. You may try to rework it in post processing.

One of the associated problems in warming up the colour temperature is blowing out the whites. The whites in the tigers face is susceptible to being overexposed and losing details ie. becoming too white. In your image the whites in a few places have lost details as well. Those can be recovered during processing.

In the image the background has become completely dark and some of the stripes of the tiger has also lost details.

I have seen this trend among people to darken the background. It looks good to see an animal with a black background. This kind of photography was encouraged some time back. People used to click macro subjects with a complete dark background. This fad wore off quickly. One of the reasons is it is not natural.

One benefit of this darkening of backgrounds is that you won't notice if there are any distracting branches or trees. However, you also miss out on showing the environment and the complex relationship of the animal and the environment.

If you can just post this image before the post processing, then we all can try to do processing and see how it would look.

I hope you don't get disheartened by my frank comments. Remember, post processing can always be learnt easily, however photographic skills are difficult to acquire and you have that already. The idea of this critiquing is to point out ways to strengthen our images and improve our skills.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[AB Apana]

A very nice image. I agree with Sabyasachi regarding the pitfalls of playing with colour temperature and white balance settings.

Compositionally I think the hotspot at top left should be cloned out.

Apana

[Kiran Ghadge]

Hi Tanmay, good to see you here... people have already said it... Nice image, waiting for more images.....