Tiger cooling off at Bandipur,Karnataka India

[V S Sankar]

We saw this male tiger during our morning safari at Bandipur.This is peak summer time in India and there are only a few water holes left for the tigers to cool off.He stayed there for 10 minutes and vanished into thick jungle.....

Canon 400D,55-250IS,ISO 400,f6.3,1/30,tripod,full frame

[Gabriela Plesea]

Dear Sir,

This is one amazing sighting you had here, but I am afraid the image presented does not give justice to this majestic animal. Aside from the fact that the point of view was not ideal (not much you could do about that I guess) there are quite a few issues I would like to mention, hope you do not mind:

1. Your shutter speed is extremely low 1/30s, you should have upped the ISO and dropped the F-stop, in my opinion. The tripod did not help much in those circumstances.
2. It seems no sharpening was applied here whatsoever?
3. Strong colour casts I have tried to remove, not sure I did a great job of it but it was worth a try.
4. The image is a bit busy, I personally find quite distracting the amount of grass present- I took the liberty to do some cloning here and there, what do you think?
5. The whites are a bit hot and the blacks a little chocked - could not recover, so sorry

I cropped tighter to eliminate some unwanted elements in the image and did some selective sharpening.

I believe it is always worth spending the time to enhance an image, this is one special sighting and I thank you for sharing!

Kind regards,

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Nice shot after Gabriela's work on it! Can't help but wonder how you got rid of those bright grass stems in the RH corner, Gabriela?

[V S Sankar]

Thanks Gabriela for the pp work.THe tiger looks more majestic now.
I havn't spend much time on pp which you have rightly pointed out.I normally dont like cloning eventhough the pic might look better post cloning.Forgive me for that!
Thanks again for the excellent pp.

Regards