I’ve mentioned feeling fortunate that I was able to escape to Yellowstone back in June. With the rest of my trips this year being cancelled, it’s the park or bust for me the rest of the year. I was happy to be there, of course, but the weather throughout much of our trip was unpredictable and varied… in other words, perfect! We never knew when another thunderstorm would roll in, or the sun would break through and cast some dramatic light on the landscape. It brought some nice surprises and amped up the adventure.
In this case, a storm was rolling in from the south as we stopped to photograph a bachelor herd of bison. The largest of the bulls strolled away and I had a pretty good sense the undulating clouds behind him would work well in monochrome. Soon after this we started getting random flashes of lightning. My father, an amateur wildlife photographer, manage to capture some of the bison with a bolt of lightning behind them, all while shooting handheld out the window of the car! Don’t ask me what I was doing, bumbling around with my own gear at the time, as I failed to land a single shot during the peak of the action.
The alignment of the bison and the horizon is terrific…
What if you exploited the Line if the sagebrush to emphasize the vanishing point above the bison.? I burned the fg grasses.
Max: this is a very nice capture of the bison in its environment. The BW choice emphasizes the forms and shapes (particularly of the clouds) which likely would to be not as impressive in color. I also like where you have placed the bison and have given the placement a new name: The Rule of Two Thirds. Richard
Thanks guys. Dick, I like your take with a darker foreground. I’ll have to look at that more, as it may offer a better tonal balance between the top and bottom of the frame.
Nice capture. I’m wondering if it would be worth playing with swapping the bison’s direction to heading left, instead of right… into the frame. It would be easy to do in photoshop, especially with the sameness of its background. It wouldn’t take much tweaking to erase the edges of the flipped bison. Like this:
Dave, thanks for your input. If I had a client who asked specifically for a digital illustration for, say, advertising purposes, I would consider doing that. But otherwise I generally shy away from such overt manipulation (e.g., cloning) in my work. In one specific case, I performed some illustration work for a print client who asked me to remove a man-made element and grossly oversaturate an image. It was something I’d never normally do with my standard color images, but they paid enough to make the time and effort worthwhile.
I understand why you would deem the reversed directionality to be better (the traditional “more room in front of the profiled subject” look), but I am also not averse to placing a forward-facing subject at the front of the frame if the movement helps tell a story. For example, a line of splashes behind a duck taking off, or in this case, a bison leaving the scene as a storm approaches.
Richard
