Please share your immediate response to the image before reading the photographer’s intent (obscured text below) or other comments. The photographer seeks a genuinely unbiased first impression.
Questions to guide your feedback
Is her behavior telling?
Other Information
Please leave your feedback before viewing the blurred information below, once you have replied, click to reveal the text and see if your assessment aligns with the photographer. Remember, this if for their benefit to learn what your unbiased reaction is.
Image Description
Alpha female lion (Panthera leo) hunkers down to minimize her visibility as she stalks an antelope. With relatively small hearts and lungs, lions are not fast runners; a maximum speed of 60kph, nor do they have the stamina to keep this pace for more than a 100 – 200m. As such, lions rely on stalking their prey and seldom charge until they are within 30m unless the prey is facing away and cannot see the charge.
Technical Details
Canon N1; Canon EF 70-200mm @ 150mm; Fugifilm Velvia 50; Scanned with Nikon Super Coolscan LS-5000; handheld
Yes, Bob, it is. I can see her carefully controlled tension as she watches her prey.
Was she on a slight uphill slope? The orientation suggests that is the case. She would be running uphill when she moved. Congratulations on catching her hunting.
Thank you @Barbara_Djordjevic for your kind remarks. Yes, the area was undulating and she was on a slight rise. That’s why her head is elevated slightly, to give her a direct line-of sight. She had two adolescents with her, one of each sex. She/they were successful on this hunt.
Bob, I see a lion hunting and probably preparing for a chase, she is staring intently at the prey. Your photo captures this well.
I see that the picture has been scanned from film and it may be that this process has caused a bit of softness in the overall image. I also think that you may be able to improve the image if you were to try to carefully clone out the grass crossing her face.
Thank you @Ryan_H for your comments. That Nikon 5000 was/is the best slide scanner on the market. I will look at the original slide to see if there is any softness of the lion. Removing the grasses superimposed over her face is not a problem. Any manipulation like that was automatically a reason for rejecting a photo for publication to serious magazines, i.e. NatGEO, when this was made. I’ll address that issue with the grass when I look for the source of the softness.
Viewing the original slide—it is dark. That image was made near dawn. Rescanning was uneventful but pushing the exposure generated noise. Eliminating the noise resulted in the “soft” appearance you noted. Although I removed the grasses from her face, I am not going to post it as it really isn’t an improvement since the softness remains.
