On the hunt for wild tigers in India

On our recent trip to India, we took our photo tour attendees to Bandhavgarh National Park in search of wild tigers. Unlike Africa, where you are pretty much guaranteed to see lions in the wild (and many times over), the search for wild tigers has no guarantees.

We ended up searching for tigers for more than 2 days and only got one very clear viewing of this beautiful female.

We were driving along this dirt road, fairly early in the morning, when our driver hit the brakes hard. Straight in front of us was this female tiger walking in the soft sand. We stayed in that same location for a couple of seconds before the driver put the vehicle in reverse and gave room for this beautiful tiger to come up the road.

The tiger came up around a bend and in perfect view of us. With all of us in burst mode, we took as many photos as we could.



I was using the Canon 5D Mark IV and Canon 100-400mm lens and took as many photos as I could in the short amount of time we had with her, making sure that my focal point was on the tigers face. I had everyone set their cameras to ISO 2000, f/5.6 in aperture priority mode. We were all using servo focus to make sure that, as the cat moved towards us, she stayed in focus.



With the settings we had, we ended up with a shutter speed of 1/250 sec, which allowed for a very sharp face and a little motion in the front paw.

I like this image so much that it is now the background image on my iPhone.

This is a crop of the same image. I don't know about you, but I could look at this face forever.

My wife, Annette, captured this video while we were all cranking out our still shots.

In total, we had less than 2 minutes to see and photograph this tiger, but as you can see from the final images, it was totally worth it.

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