Zoo Photography

Just saw some photos of Boza Ivanovic in a magazine and I'm just stunned that he could make such photos with natural lighting and without special treatment, he just bought a ticket like everyone else.

Do you think he get such photos with processing them or camera control?
I mean it's hard to get such a dark background with a good lighted animal.

Do some one else have some amazing zoo photos?
And how do your take your photos?

Great link Stefan. They are superb images which really go beyond the obvious. Looks like a combination of visiting the zoo at the right time of day, choosing shooting angles which maximise the effects of backlighting, and some very skilled processing. I expect he is very good at previsualising what the raw material will end up like.

He has totally avoided the approach of 'ooh look, a giraffe' - click! 'ooh look, a water buffalo' - click! which I suffer from at the zoo.

Inspirational photos to my mind - thanks Stefan for the link... makes me want to visit the zoo although I doubt I would end up with anything quite like this... The last time I went to the zoo was in February on a bleak day but on the plus side the place was quite empty... Didn't get anything like this though...

Wow. Excellent link Stefan. Many thanks.

Thank you guys, it's time to visit the zoo I believe

Will you are certainly right, he waited 4 days from 9am to 5pm in front of the lion cage to capture the shot you see when you visit the link

Thanks for the link they are excellent photos.

Sandy

Great photos, loverly strong backlight on them.

Because I'm nerdy about these things, the few intact EXIF's show that his zoo pics are all shot at almost exactly the same setting regardless of animal or time - 560mm (FF shots)/400mm (APS shots), ISO 400, F/8 and 1/1000 - now I just stuck those values into my lightmeter, and I've got to be in the very strong sunshine we have today to get to that shutter speed. Yet he's made the pictures look they were shot in a dark studio. Interesting...

Mr Ivanovic has done a great job. Strong compositions, strong directional lighting and lots of post processing! I really like what he's done.

Here's my effort. It's not the most interesting image in the world, but it didn't take much using a curves control to achieve a similar effect. I guess I could have dodged and burned specific areas too like Mr Ivanovic appears to have done on some of his images.

[IMG]http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q122/mattcambs/SG201561_DEV2.jpg[/IMG]

Thank you for exploring the processing, like said lighting is very important I believe and Matt you come very close.
I think you need to underexpose your photos to get it precisely right, it will also darken the background a lot.

The above photo was processed from the RAW at -2EV, plus I put a huge amount of extra contrast using curves to bring out the areas where the light hits the wolf.

I'm now behind my fathers PC, cheap LCD screen not calibrated and it indeed looks almost perfect but at home behind my calibrated CRT screen I could clearly see things in the background.

Very interesting forum
I also find one of the photo magazines with this project and it does not say how he manage to make this photos- But it does say that he travel to 8 countries to get the shots some in eastern and western europe,I think in Canada and Mexico too, also says that he visited 17 zoos so far
So I wonder if Flossie is right than why did Mr.Ivanovich travel and used so much time and money
Could he just do this in local zoo and then finish everything in computer like it was suggested here?
I just think that there is more here than just simple pp in photoshop

Sonja

Thank you Sonja.
It's in Silvershotz of these two months where I read about him.
It's a fine-art magazine and in those an artist never explains in details how they created a photo since that's never the purpose of those magazines.

From what I understand he is a freelance photographer and he did this project in between shoots, the locations are South Africa, Tanzania, Mexico, Serbia, Macedonian and Canada.

I think it's a matter of everything, a good photo with good processing.

How does he define zoo? Wildlife park? Seaworld?

He obviously has a better class of zoo than I do - a beluga whale for heavens sake! Cleaner glass than my local zoo has too.

I'm off to the zoo tomorrow morning since I have a season ticket and nothing else planned.
Must get to Blijdorp sometime too.

nice link stefan. its really fascinating to say that we could make pictures like that from our local zoo. its been a long time since my last visit. still need a lot to learn in picture processing and picture taking