Nile Crocodile in HDR (High Dynamic range

Last week my high school photography students went on a field trip to the San Antonio Zoo. As the students explored the photographic opportunities, I wandered through the Africa Live exhibit where I found this Nile Crocodile resting by the water with its mouth open.  Fortunate enough to have a motionless subject, I captured three different exposures and merged them together into a single HDR (High Dynamic Range) image using PhotoMatix Pro.  For creative effect, I decided to push the colors and contrast outside the realm of reality, creating the grungy image above.

Lion image using HDR (High Dynamic Range)

Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania.

Close encounters with wildlife are one of the main reasons wildlife photographers keep returning to the field.  In this case, my close encounter was with a female lion lying down a few feet away from the road.  She allowed our vehicle to approach to within a few yards and spent most of her time concentrating on the flies instead of us.  One a few occasions she did look our way and one of those times I was able to catch her direct stare on camera.  After normal development, I decided to try something different with the image.  I began with a severe crop of the original, eliminating everything except the eyes.  I then took the image into Photomatix and manipulated the HDR settings to take the dynamic range to the extremes.  I have seen a lot of landscape images done in HDR, but almost nothing that includes wildlife.  I like the end result, which looks almost like a detailed painting instead of a photograph.

What do you think?

Image created using a Canon 1D mark 2, 120-300mm lens, at ISO 400.  The image was captured from a vehicle, with the lens supported on a beanbag.