We've just returned from another 12 days spent in my favourite South African wilderness area - The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.
I've got many more cheetah images to share with you as this place has been very kind to me with regards to cheetah sightings over the last 3 years...but thought I'd kick off with this lioness.
It was a frustrating morning near the Nossob rest camp. For 4 days I had been out of the gates first, headed north in search of the lion pride I knew was there. I tracked their fresh spoor every day in the sandy roads, sometimes so fresh that the sand around the edges were still forming crunched-up walls around the spoor. Yet every morning I would just miss them and they would be in the long grass, impossible to spot.
On this, our last morning in this area of the park, we headed out again after missing them the previous afternoon when we headed South for a change for our drive. Again I found their spoor. Again they were not in the road anymore. We pushed on a bit, and turned around, and then found them lying asleep next to the road. All of them seemed to have had a long night...and the only one giving us any reaction was this lioness.
Techs:
Nikon D3s with Nikkor 200-400mm f4 VR-II @ 290mm
f4.0 @ 1/500 SS @ ISO-220
I opened up to f4 to get the FG foliage OOF - I think it worked well, don't you?
Comments
17 commentsMax
Jagdeep Rajput
Vincent I initially had the lioness on the RHS with more "dead space" on the LHS...but felt I wanted to focus on the details here and placed her with her ears on a ROT line and her nose on the LHS ROT line. I might post another version along the lines of your suggestion later.
I should mention that every time I view this on my phone I zoom in to read the comments better, and in so doing create a vertical crop on the picture. And every time that happens I think, man...that looks really, really good as a vertical, too! I know that's not at all what one might naturally think of when composing the image or playing with crop options in pp, but if you are playing with it again you should see what you think...it's a little tight I guess but has a ton of impact. I still think you probably made the right call on comp exactly as presented, but this makes a compelling alternative and good option for uses needing a vertical format.
Still can't get over the perfect use of DOF here...not just in the beautiful OOF areas but also the perfect balance on her face/head. Great work!
I quite liked the vertical/portrait suggestion by John Launstein, so here's a go at it...