A regal pose in winter

This Siberian tiger picture is from a winter wildlife workshop I conducted in the 90s, again taken with film. What struck me was how the color of the tiger stood out against the wintry environment. I also like the regal pose of this majestic cat. Before we were using digital cameras, and years before the RAW format was developed, it was very tricky to retain texture and detail in pure white snow when photographing a subject that was considerably darker. That's why I used a handheld meter, the Sekonic. The incident mode on such a meter means the light is being read as it falls on the scene, not (like a reflected meter, the type we have in our cameras) as the light is bouncing back from the scene into the lens. In the latter system, the white snow can trick the meter into underexposure. When using a meter on incident mode, it can't be fooled by elements in a composition that are very bright or very dark. I used a tripod to support the Mamiya RZ 67, even though I was in knee-deep snow, and I shot this with a 250mm lens at 1/125 and f/5.6 with Fujichrome Provia 100. Notice the shape of the image. This is the 6x7cm format, or 2 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches, which almost exactly coincides with the Golden Mean Rectangle as defined by the ancient Greeks as having the ideal proportions of a rectangle.