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Questions to guide your feedback
Handling the tone of the wet hind end.
Other Information
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Image Description
I’ve often wondered why one rarely sees images of beavers on social media. I learned why when out with “Beaver Bob” near Blairgowrie, Scotland earlier this month. He guarantees beaver sightings, but he doesn’t say when. So we scoured the river until the light was almost gone, when this largely nocturnal animal started emerging from the water sufficiently to be photographed. I used the slowest possible shutter speed for a moving animal and jacked the ISO up to 4000. Thanks to Topaz deNoise AI I was able to remove the grain, but I still had color problems in processing due to the low light.
Technical Details
Sony a1, Sony 100-400mm @ 400mm. Manual exposure f/5.6@ 1/320th, ISO 4000.
Hi Charles, I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve lived with lots of American beavers, but I’ve never seen a Eurasian beaver except on TV – so I don’t know about the subtleties of your critter’s coat colors and I don’t want to mislead.
My first reaction was that there’s a bit too much purplish color along the wet back and paddle, as well as the hind foot. And perhaps because it’s next to the beaver’s wet flank, the flank looks monochromatic by comparison. (To my eye, however, the monochromatic dark wet flank looks ‘correct.’) From there, my eye moved foreward and I see ‘correct’-looking blonde hairs in the fur, but then I also see some patchy kind of orange-ishness here and there that doesn’t look quite right. I wonder if there’s too much saturation or vibrance on the subject? But, then, in my experience, wet American beavers are like wet moose: pretty dark and monochromatic to begin with. My old brain cell (singular) may just be trying to force its own memory onto a scene where it doesn’t belong. So I hope this comment helps, and I encourage you to ignore it if it doesn’t!
Very best regards from a fellow observer of Chips’ incredible ambush speed! – Michael
p.s.: and now that I’ve read your image description, I’ll just add that the beavers I’ve seen in daylight have never looked much more colorful than the ones I’ve watched at night. (Same for my observations of wet moose, Although dry moose out in sagebrush can have sort of coppery tinges in their coats in the right light.)
It is always very satisfying to capture the animals, which are not seen that often. Unique tail of this Beaver fascinated me alot. I do see the purple in lighter tones.
