In our search for as many opportunities to photograph tigers as possible, we came across The Big Cat Sanctuary Photography Experience in Kent. Naturally we had to book their photography experiences and take the opportunity to take some more shots of wild cats.
Annoyingly on the day we chose to visit the forecast wasn’t looking good, and bar a few parts that were not raining a lot of the time was either spent with light rain or torrential rain. Not that long before we were due to visit, I decided to buy the Canon RF 100 – 500mm which thankfully has pretty good weather sealing, but unfortunately, I didn’t have as good a time, by the time we finished I was soaked through.
On the photography experience you get taken around the site with their resident photographer and shown all the animals up close, obviously you can’t enter the enclosures, but you also probably wouldn’t want to.
Puna didn’t want to play ball initially, thinking instead she was going to get fed, eventually she went into a dark little cave in the enclosure and was encouraged to walk straight towards us from the pitch black hiding spot, as you can see from the shots above, it made for some dramatic photos, especially the one with her looking straight down the camera licking her lips!
Luca was new to the sanctuary and spent most of the time we were in this area playing in the water with a very large bright blue oil drum, you could see the teeth marks in the metal from the sheer force of his mouth.
It’s hard to get creative with angles when you only have a limited space and area to shoot, and nobody wants to lay on the ground in front of a Lion or Tiger that could easily try to attach you, however Petra was the exception, I was able to get quite an interesting angle, if you look closely enough you can see the droplets of rain also in the frame, I love the post of this one, the upward angle and the gaze gives it a powerful feeling.
Willow was quite far away at the top of a mound in the middle of the enclosure, she didn’t move from that spot the entire time we were watching, however I did manage to get some amazing shots of the water droplets that were glistening on her fur. It had just started to rain harder, luckily, we were under cover a little as we stood and took some shots. The last image there makes her look like a scorpion!
Valentina spent a lot of the time standing in that little tunnel, she didn’t seem to want to engage much with us as we stood there, but it’s still a nice shot.
Sahee was very noisy! He seemed to love roaring, possibly because it was close to feeding time, at one stage he seemed to be very interested in one of the people that was in the group, staring intensely to find out what was going on.
Finally, Maya was very difficult to get a shot of, firstly she spent most of the time above us on a platform watching what we were doing, secondly it was already quite dark, so getting a shot of her wasn’t easy. While it’s not the most interesting photo, I just love the detail of the water droplets sitting on her fur.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable day, and even though we got soaked, the rain added an extra element to a lot of the photos that you wouldn’t have got if it had been bright sun.
Posted in: Photography