“Elder Statesman” A B&W Lion Portrait

Took my son and one of his friends to the zoo not long ago, and of course my camera as well, it was basically just a walk around and take family pictures day. As I moved thru the zoo I came across this old regal lion, he was pretty far away and I didn’t have a telephoto lens that I thought was good enough to get a good shot with, so I grabbed a couple images and moved on.

When I got home and opened the files, I wasn’t really hot or cold on the image so I put it away and forgot about it. Today after finishing my chores I got back on the computer and was looking for shots of my son and came across this and decided to play around with it, the light was really bad at the zoo and it was very humid as well, not a good combination of elements for outdoor photography. As I took a second look at this image things started to look a little different to me, after cropping a lot of the image around the lion’s head and concentrating on his profile his true character began to develop.

He definitely had a lot of age on him which I tried to convey thru a b&w conversion and a shot of levels adjustment to darken the lines in his face a bit, I then went into the exposures tool and brought the grays out in his mane and fur, a little sharpening( maybe too much) and this was the result.

This is definitely one of those images you have to be careful with, you never know till you really sit down and have a look, as too whether or not if it will come out to you’re liking.

BTW I shot this with my 70- 300 mm Tamaron 5.6 lens (a very versatile lens) shot at f- 5.6 , 1/400, iso 500.