The Stare

Tech Info: Nikon D300s | 70-300 @200mm | ISO 800 | f/6.3 | 1/60s

The stare of a lioness when her sleep was disturbed.

During my recent visit to India, I had an opportunity to spend a night at the Jungle Lodges in Bannerghatta National Park. Well, the initial plan was to head to Kabini, but since that didn’t work out, we headed to this place and it was well worth it.

If you ever get a chance to stay at any place managed by Jungle Lodges, then I’d strongly recommend going for it. Its one of the better managed places that I’ve found and extreme care is given to the guests without hurting the ‘go green’ mantra.

The zoo, doesn’t host a lot of these big cats as they have a dedicated large area inside the forest. You can take the safari tour to get a view of them. The safari works really great for the kids, but not for us who want to get pictures. The room available on the van is very limited for a free movement of the camera due to the heavy guarding it has – of course that is needed for the safety of animals and the people inside the van. Due to this, most of the shots would be through the window. So if you are lucky, you might find them perfectly positioned for your shots. If not, then you just have to do with what you get 🙂

Processing:

1. Used Lightroom 3 to convert the raw image with adjustments to white balance.
2. Made it into a high contrast image in Lightroomm and exported to Photoshop
3. Cloned out the grass using a copy of the background layer.
4. A curves layer for more contrast.
5. A channel mixer layer for B&W conversion.
6. Resized and Sharpened the image for web & closed it with a watermark

Hover your mouse over the image to see the Before version.