The skill of my first round opponent in the Enzo tournament had me stressing over this challenge all week. I had several ideas for Bread, but they would all require a lot of work. Little did I know this would take longer. :-/
I got some decent panning shots of my kids sledding, but I figured others would try that too and, well... it's kids. I'll bet nobody else tried this, and for good reason... I spent nearly three hours standing out in the cold waiting for these tigers to run. This particular zoo is not very camera-friendly, either. The tigers are surrounded by a shiny chain link fence, so you have to shoot where shade falls on the fence to avoid reflections. That requirement, plus the surrounding poles, bushes and signs, leave a very narrow window for capturing action. There are obstructions just outside the frame on either side of this scene. In addition, the tigers have to be running across the field of view to get anything sharp (most of the time they moved at an angle toward or away from me). Yes, the missing head on the first tiger is distracting, but it's the best I could do under the circumstances. My strategy was to manually focus in a particular spot, then wait for the tigers to cross that point and follow them as smoothly as I could using the camera handheld in burst mode. Out of over 400 shots, I got maybe 3 good ones. Hope it's good enough!
Processing Convert from RAW, Shadow/Highlight (just the highlights), channel mixer for saturation, boost the green channel, desaturate the blue and cyan channels, Levels, Curves, and several rounds of USM and Noise Ninja.
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This is the winner for me, because i thought this is what the challenge was looking for. And not the infocus subject out of focus background I keep seeing.
I love this :)
Being patient paid off with this shot. Great capture of awesome subjects in motion. I think that the one running out of the image adds a bit of mystery about where they are going, and seems to infer that the run isn't limited to the frame of the image.
This photograph has a great amount of movement. It does take a second to figure out the focal point becaseu it is somewhat small, but it is a strong one.
Even though the rest of the bodies aren't in focus, the face of the back tiger is, and that makes this photo FANTASTIC to me. If the whole tiger was in focus, I don't think it would have been as interesting to me. The crop also is great for this.
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