What I learned from a day photographing rescued endangered cats
5x5 As a word-wrangler who thought it was better to be good at writing and get a professional to do the pictures, I’ve never bothered with more than a basic digital camera or a smartphone for my own needs. That was, until I set off for Indonesian Borneo last year, and a pocket camera seemed inadequate for three weeks surrounded by orangutans and other fantastic wildlife.
My creatively abundant partner, Sharon, loaned me her camera kit and a crash course in photography. It turned out that I really enjoyed taking better photos, I improved a lot in a few weeks and the results were occasionally quite good. This Christmas she dropped me an Introduction to Wildlife Photography with goingdigital.co.uk to see what more I could learn.
The subject? Big cats and other captive subjects at The Cat Survival Trust in Hertfordshire, a small charity that both funds a wildlife reserve in Argentina, and looks after cats recovered from private zoos, illegal importers and idiots who think that a lynx or leopard cub is a cool pet.
They can’t be returned to the wild (if they were ever there before) so founder Dr Terry Moore and his volunteers give them a home. It’s not a zoo, and they’re rarely bothered by people other than the trust’s entirely volunteer staff.
Tutor Peter Smart preps the day with a lesson on how to set up your camera for capturing those classic wildlife shots: eyes in focus and a depth of field that pulls them out of the background, framing and composing your subjects even when they’re moving, balancing ISO and shutter speed, reviewing your photos as you go to adjust your settings, and when to let Lightroom or Photoshop take the strain.
And the final rule of photography in the digital era? Shoot as much as possible with a variety of settings and only show the very best to your audience. So here are my five favourites and how I got them.
My kit (still on loan!) is a Canon EOS 550D, with either a Sigma EF75–300mm zoom lens or the factory standard EF-S18–55mm. To Sharon’s dismay, I got in the habit of shooting large JPEGs instead of RAW last summer because I didn’t have enough storage for three weeks without Dropbox to archive them. I took 5,000 photos (of which I’m pleased with less than 100).
Note: This isn’t how to take photos. This is how I took some photos.
1 The shy jaguar. Athena, aka Jags, is a new arrival to the trust, so she’s not used to people, let alone to several photographers around her cage, and paced around grumpily when she was out at all, but she finally picked a spot where we could get a good view.
I didn’t even know I’d got this shot until I reviewed my photos. It’s shot at ISO 1600, with a 1/3200 exposure at f/4.5 on a 130mm focal length. The original is heavily shadowed but her eyes, whiskers and face are sharp, the depth of field is short, and she’s neatly framed by the foliage.The ISO is a little high but there’s not too much noise.
In Lightroom I added a little colour temperature and exposure, reduced the highlights and blacks, and boosted the shadows and whites. Adding lens correction improved the focus and detail. I didn’t even need to crop.
2 Tasteh! The two endangered snow leopards were my favourites, with their thick, smoky grey fur deceptively difficult to capture in detail. They seemed oblivious to our presence, but obligingly posed and roamed around their enclosure, lounging on ledges and yawning to show off their teeth. Or in this case, chasing a difficult bogey.
You can just about make out one challenge you wouldn’t find in the wild: shooting through a cage without finding your image clouded by out-of-focus wire. The 1600 ISO worked well in the cloudy light, with a 1/400 exposure on a 155mm zoom at f/5, so only the face is sharp.
A last-minute snap, the composition is hurried but the crop makes it all about that face, with very little adjustment aside from a little clarity and vibrance.
3A proud leopard. You’d never get this close to an Amur leopard in the wild, even if you could find one of the 30 or surviving animals. The trust’s two leopards are used to visitors, and didn’t mind a lens coming close to meet you eye-to-eye from just a few feet.
Caught between two lenses, the short lens was wound up to its maximum 55mm while I kept enough distance to keep my subject happy. The f/5.6 aperture could have been tightened but that might have given me a lot of sharp wire and a blurry cat. And it’s a reminder that there are more of these creatures in cages than roaming free, when they used to be found throughout Korea, north-east China and the Russian far east. ISO is the 1600 I’d settled on for the light, with a 1/125 sec exposure.
There’s no cropping the only post-production is a touch of vibrance and clarity. That’s just how it came out.
4 Doing time. The Cat Survival Trust gets non-felines when customs and the police have no-one else to turn to with, and this raccoon dog poked his head up as I walked across from the ring-tailed lemurs, looking like Paddington Bear’s criminal cousin. There’s a scrappy little pack of them, probably refugees from some Disney-inspired pet craze that left dumbass parents with a feral animal in their home.
It’s not in perfect focus because I shot it quickly on a 300mm zoom with an f/5.6 aperture, but the eyes have that all-important shine. If anything’s in focus, it’s the line of red brick, and a wider aperture would have given a more forgiving depth of field, but the trees frame that angry face neatly.
I cropped it and let Lightroom knock down the highlights and blacks but bring up the shadows and whites, fluffing up the texture in his fur.
5 Flight risk Cats and birds traditionally go together even worse than cats and dogs, but I had to have a go at this bird-of-prey cruising back and forth across his cage. You’re supposed to rely on deep apertures and high speeds for birds in the wild, a long distance with a very long lens, so it was an opportunity to get something different with the kit I had on hand.
It’s a lucky shot from a sequence as he took flight, but a high speed shutter (1/4000) and the high ISO (1600 again) worked in my favour with a short focus (34mm) and f/5.6 aperture to bring the subject out. A lower ISO might have made it less noisy, but the wing edges are sharp despite a gentle blur of motion across his plumage.
There’s a heavy crop to get rid of the bars, and a grey line across the wing-tip tells me I should have got closer to the cage and zoomed out. Lots of detail came out by turning down the black levels and hammering the highlights, with a generous boost of shadow and mild helping of white levels.
I’m not a massive fan of birds, but they are challenging to shoot and birds of prey can be magnificent. Maybe that’s another course worth taking.
