Poised Cheetah

[Morkel Erasmus]

The light was all but gone here, with the sun having dipped below the dunes on the sides of the dry Auob riverbed in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. This male cheetah was sitting in the riverbed as we made our way back to camp to make the closing time.

He suddenly got up and started to stalk a steenbok that was high up on the dune...

Techs:
Canon 7D with 100-400mm L IS USM @ 400mm
f5.6 @ 1/100 SS @ ISO-800
fill flash fired
subject distance 44m

[Harshad Barve]

Super cool pose here by Cheetah Morkelbhai , excellent BG and lovely raised foot ,
TFS

[Ken Watkins]

Morkel,

Nice pose here the raised leg adds greatly.

Colours are strange but then it is the Kalahari.

Does your fill flash have any effect at 44m, I presume you used a Better Beamer or something similar, I am surprised it would reach so far.

[Marc Mol]

Lovely pose and after sun colour Morkel, just need to back off the S/H tool a tad as some halo evident around the Cheetah.
TFS

[Alfred Forns]

Sweet pose and love the light !!! Great feel Might want to select the animal and contract a couple of pixels before using the shadow highlight ... btw which PS are you running, have found CS5 does a better job than any of previous Big Congrats on this one !!!

[Morkel Erasmus]

thanks for the feedback everyone...

Al, Marc - the halo is strange, but I didn't apply S/H, only curves adjustments...and I usually do select the subject and contract to ensure no haloing...will do a rework sometime this weekend and see if I can avoid it

Ken - used pop-up flash, and it may have not had a great luminous effect but it helped get a sharp shot at 1/100, 400mm...you can also see some catchlight in his eyes

I am running CS4 (only recently moved on from CS3) - but really want to get CS5 and LR3 soon!

[Marc Mol]

Al, Marc - the halo is strange, but I didn't apply S/H, only curves adjustments...and I usually do select the subject and contract to ensure no haloing...will do a rework sometime this weekend and see if I can avoid it

No probs Morkel should have used a ? mark when I said S/H tool, as that is my biggest concern with halos, it is only very slight on my cal monitor.
BTW, CS5 is worth the upgrade IMO. ;)

[Arthur Morris]

Stunning pose and posture. The little plant would have been a plus had it been in front of the subject.... I'd lose the large gray spot in front of the animal even though it does not appear to be a real dust spot....

[Hilary Hann]

Beautiful cheetah, like the oof background. Interesting colours here, but never having been to the Kalahari I don't know what to expect. Good to see some cats of a different kind of spots coming out to play!

[Steve Kaluski]

One of your best Morkel and from 44m...

Would agree with Artie about cleaning up a few spots in front and a few others just to give it a cleaner feel and would not go against your PS ethics I think. Love the overall colour & feel of this Morkel.

Nice one. :cheers::cheers::cheers:

Steve

[Russell Johnson]

Nice clean image......would agree about cleaning up a few of the spots.

[Rachel Hollander]

Morkel - beautiful image and light. Would agree with the others about cleaning up the image.

TFS,
Rachel

[John Ippolito]

Beautiful pose with the foot raised, excellent colors and detail in this relative close up. Agree on the spot clone. Excellent image.

[Morkel Erasmus]

thanks for all the kind comments everyone. indisposed at a conference during the daytime...

the "spot" is actually an OOF rock in the BG

here is a repost with it fixed and some LCE applied to the cheetah