Animus Photography

As a nice end to the year, I have been published in one of Australia’s top selling photography magazines – Digital Photography + Design with a write up on one of my favourite images – Edge.

Many thanks to Charles McKean for contacting me and to the editors for letting me say what I wanted to say.

On The Edge

“Edge” is a bit of an anomaly in my collection of zoo photographs.  In order to avoid including typical ‘zoo’ signs in my photos, I generally stick to close up animal portraiture, taking care to edit out any man made signs that I was not able to exclude while taking the shot in-camera.

In the case of “Edge’ though, I wanted the image to work symbolically, with the lone Orangutan on the edge of the zoo platform representing the species itself on the edge of extinction.  With this in mind it didn’t really matter that I was forced to include some unnatural habitat in the shot, as it worked just as well thematically as an obvious ‘zoo’ shot.

Editing wise I still had a lot of work to do.  The Orangutan and platform was covered in bright straw, and there was a distracting doorway to the rear of the animal.  I used Photoshop CS3 to carefully clone out the straw on the ape’s back area and cropped the image so that the doorway was no longer part of the frame.   The platform’s straw could not be cloned out completely so I burnt the corner of the image using the burn tool in Photoshop.

I was lucky when it came to the lighting,  but felt that as an image it did not work as well as it could.   I chose a sepia action in Adobe Lightroom as the base of my colourisation and then played with the saturation and tone to produce a treatment  that felt timeless, but not overdone.

While the position of the Orangutan on the ‘edge’ was vital to the image, I also needed her expression to be as clear and powerful as possible – so I transferred the image back to Photoshop and opened up the highlights on the face using the Shadow/Highlight tool and sharpened the eye area with unsharp mask.

Lastly, I added a slight vignette around the image in Lightroom using a custom preset.

“Edge” was shot with a Canon EOS 50D & a Canon 70-200mm F4 L Lens.

Natalie Manuel is  a self taught, award-winning photographer.  Her work has been published and exhibited locally and internationally.  She mainly photographs zoo animals but also enjoys photographing dogs.

Text copyright Digital Photography + Design magazine.