In The Evening Light

Ingrid,

anyone that has seen a cheetah in the wild will immediately associate Africa with this image. The expression of the cheetah is also very nice, as well the overall light conditions. Anyhow, for displaying purposes I would have gone for a vertikal crop, maybe 3:4, since I feel that the fallen tree is a bit too dominat ...

Ummm, yeah. Pretty special shot in absolutely gorgeous light, Ingrid! Love the diagonal, the soft range of highlights to shadows, the OOF branches, the darker right side, the killer light in the eye...needless to say this one works for me! 

Stunning - don't have any more words for this.  I wish that the trunk woudl be in focus as well - but overall I would be very happy with this 

Hi Ingrid,

This one is a real eye-catcher. I love the overall colour palette...so harmonious.

Given this is evening light, I do wonder if the image is just a bit too bright globally? To me the image seems "mid-day" bright and doesn't carry the ambience of an evening scene. Just a thought...

Cheers...and thanks for sharing...

Brad

Ingrid,
BEAUTIFUL is all that is needed

Thanks a lot for your comments, Cay-Uwe, John, Luke, Ken and Brad! 

Brad, I'm not quite sure what you mean...mid-day bright in Africa looks much harsher... this photo was taken at 18:02 and sunset was at 18:33 on that day, so this is evening light. It is represented as it was, not much has been done to this photo and I wouldn't want to make it look any darker than it was.

Thanks again! 

Ingrid.

Hello Ingrid .  I really enjoy this well exposed capture!   Evening light can be so captivating with the warm tones .

Thanks for sharing

Bill
www.Billbickle.com

Hi Ingrid,

What I mean is that evening light is lower than mid-day light. Our camera's light meters always try to produce an overall neutral gray exposure - which is daytime light. So if the light goes lower in the evening (which it does) the camera will not expose it properly - it will overexpose it and make it look like a mid-day scene. The minute a scene differs from neutral gray (mid-day light) you have to make exposure compensations to accurately convey the lighting at the time. So if you "do nothing" to any image shot in the evening (either at the time of capture or in post-processing) it will not accurately reflect the lighting levels at the time of the exposure.

That's all! 

Cheers...

Brad

PS: As previously stated - I do like the shot very much!

Ah, thank you, Brad, for expanding on what you meant. And I had not misunderstood the fact that you like the photo, thanks for your appreciative comment. 
When I say I didn't do much to it, I meant in PP. I do understand how light metering works, so can tell you explain it very well . I used spot metering and had the focus spot, hence the metering (for Nikon), on the eye. As the eye was lit there by the sun, I overexposed by 1/3 EV, otherwise it would have been rendered too dark, as you explain, by the camera's light meter. Which should give the photo an overall correct exposure. So it is respresented as it was and afterwards hasn't been altered much.
Hope it's now clear what we all meant 
Thanks again!
Ingrid.

Gorgeous framing Ingrid ..... nice light too <div id="myEventWatcherDiv" style="display:none;"> </div>