Those are great pictures John Nowak. ... Tigers are real and amateurs can snap great shots with ease.
Thank you, and yes, there is absolutely luck involved, but an amateur can go to another continent and get this sort of picture easily enough.
So I am confident that you checked to make sure your camera was in working order, you went with people who were competent at locating tigers, and they in turn proceeded in a way to maximize the probability of their clients seeing them...
Exactly. I wanted good pictures, the guides wanted to give me the opportunity, and they did.
Also, I shoot in drive mode, three to five frames a second, and I didn't keep the blobtigers. So I'm kind of uncomfortable when people poke fun at bad photography. I take a lot of bad pictures; I just don't show them.
You held the camera steady! I have tried to make this point before, and it doesn't go over well, but it is so wrong to accept the "mortal chaos" argument of 'footers in shaking cameras wildly and no ability to focus the camera.
This is an extremely rare animal that can kill you. Were you scaredy-pants keystone cop bungler? Or was it more like "oh, that's cool, let's snap some pictures" while focusing on making sure they'll come out well?
Hmm. That's an interesting question, I see the point and I'm just trying to come up with a good answer.
I went to Wolf Park and spent a week with their socialized wolves, learning how to behave around them. The big lesson was that you may be excited, thrilled, whatever - but the animals don't like that. They avoid people who look too interested. The thing is, I'm a crap actor.
So I try very hard to stay calm I was really thinking,
Tiger. Big deal. because I didn't want the animal to see how thrilled I was. That, and
do I need to swap my lens? Will it walk away if I do? So I can't say that I was anxious, let alone frightened.
Honestly, I didn't feel anything until that evening when I was looking through the pictures on my laptop and the guides came up behind me and asked me to go backwards and let them get a better look. That felt good.
Of course, I was doing something challenging; working a camera. An owl once scared the heck out of me. So I'm not sure how I'd feel if I unexpectedly came across a nine-foot monkey and I wasn't taking pictures.
The reason I ask is because the characterizations these 'footers make scream out to me that they are making it up. You have a real experience and can share with others exactly how these real experiences feel. It isn't anything like what 'footers claim. Right?
In general, I would say not a bit. Assuming I had a camera (or, I imagine, a rifle; I don't shoot) I would be far too busy taking pictures to feel much of anything at that time.