Wildlife Heritage Foundation big cats

It was my privilege to be able to spend a day at our local WHF big cat centre near Smarden last Saturday. Together with a couple of friends, we booked a four-person workshop and spent a fantastic day with Andy, the resident photographer, who was able to give us advice and tips on both the animals and photographic techniques.

The stock lens for the day was a 70-200 f/2.8, which all but the photos of the white lions were taken with; these were more distant and I used a 500mm f/4 for this species.

After a safety briefing and introduction we were soon in front of one of the Amur tigers. This was a fairly easy introduction to photography as the animals were fairly sedentary and did not pose too many technical challenges but, as you can see from the photo below, not particularly photogenic.

Amur tiger

Next we moved on to the white lions, where a family group were busy feeding and posing for us.

We were advised to keep our shutter speeds above 1/640th (I aimed for 1/1000th), which meant that I used a range of ISO from 200 to 3200 during the course of the day. Apertures were generally around the f/5.6 to f/7.1 range, with a few shots taken wide-open to give shallow DOF.

'The Daddy'

Mother with cub

Lion cubs at play

I felt quite comfortable around most of the cats but there were two that had a particular sinister feeling when at close proximity: the Leopard and the Jaguar; the latter in particular was incredibly powerful, dark and dangerous!

Leopard stare

The Jaguar

Care was needed to check exposures regularly as it is all too easy to let the whites blow out or, conversely, to under-expose and leave lots of noise lurking in the shadows.

One of the most elegant of the cats at the centre is the Clouded Leopard. The pair were very different in their behaviour, with the female quite happy to pose and the rather ungainly male, which was rather camera-shy. The photo below is the best I got of the male, who has 'warmer' more appealing markings than the female.

Male clouded leopard

One of the great things with modern digital cameras is the ability to shoot at high ISO settings and have such little noise that it can be easily removed in Lightroom without any noticeable degradation of image quality.

Having started at 10am it seemed like no time at all until we were breaking for lunch and, once fed and watered, we were out again with our cameras.

One of the most popular cats at the centre is the Snow Leopard and, having been in its company for a few minutes I could see why. It was very serene in its behaviour and, whilst a bit tricky to photograph, it made you want to come back for more.

Snow leopard - in profile

Snow leopard

One of the things that I had not realised before we went was that we would be able to get into the enclosures (supervised of course) of both the Cheetah and the Lynx.

These encounters were the highlight of the day and, whilst one can get good images from behind the fences, there's nothing like being a few metres away from these amazing animals.

I'll sign off with a few photos of these beautiful creatures and look forward to next year when I will revisit with my camera.

Cheetah growling just a few metres away

 

Cheetah, looking more relaxed

Eurasian Lynx

Thanks to all the staff at WHF for making us so welcome and to Andy for his professional advice; 'a good day was had by all'.

Let us not also forget that all big cats are endangered species and celebrate the work that the WHF and other organisations do in conservation.