Peek-a-Boo

the story

The forest was going grey at the edges when the shape resolved itself. Not a movement so much as a correction — the grass had been telling me one thing, and suddenly it was telling me another. A tree trunk cut the frame in two. On one side, nothing. On the other, exactly half a tiger: an ear, the black and white architecture of the face, one open eye. The stripes ran on down into the dry stems and dissolved there. I kept the trunk where it was. Cropping it out would have been a lie about how the animal was actually seen — which is to say, barely, and on its terms. That is the picture: not a tiger revealed, but a tiger allowing.

the encounter

I found the tiger already still, held behind a tree trunk that split the frame vertically. Only the left half of the face and a narrow strip of striped flank were clear of the wood; the rest was absorbed by trunk and tall dry grass. I worked at a shallow depth of field so the foreground stems and the second trunk fell soft, leaving the single visible eye as the sharpest point in the image. The light was low and flat, and the whole scene sat in a narrow range of rust, brown and slate — colours I chose to keep rather than lift, because the muted palette is what made the concealment convincing in the first place.