Putting on a show

A white tiger at the 2013 Colorado Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado:

Putting on a show

Admittedly, white tigers are eye-catching, and maybe their presence at shows like this somehow supports or encourages conservation.  But the reality is that white tigers are Bengal tiger mutants not normally found in nature — and they’re only still around thanks to generations of human-induced inbreeding.  They are often used by zoos and other shows (most famously, Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas) to draw in visitors — but the breeding of white tigers has been banned by the American Zoological Association (AZA) since June of 2011.

Got my eye on you…

On a hike to see waterfalls along the Johnston Canyon trail in Banff National Park, this little guy was making sure we knew he was around:

Got my eye on you

Normally I’m used to squirrels trying to look cute for a hand-out; this was definitely a territorial display, though. Lots of barking accompanied the serious looks from this little guy. I had to laugh, but felt a bit sorry that I did — he was doing his best to look tough, after all…

Poised

A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:

Poised

I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:

1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).

2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.

3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.

So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).