How well this works as a B&W print?
Composition, should more of the trees on the left be cropped out?
Canon 7D MII, Canon EF-100-400mm F-4.5/5.6L IS II USM
@ 100mm, 1/1000 @ F-32, ISO 800 HH
I like the slopes of the left and middle trees, aligned with the slope of the giraffe’s head. The scene has a low to it.
For me, the cropping opportunity is from the top right; I don’t need all that gray sky.
You made some artistic choices (a) to go with a silhouette, and (b) to not bring out the clouds in the sky. Just personal, but having more texture in giraffe, trees, and sky would, I think work better for me. One technique for working with the sky is Alister Benn’s history brush approach to add contrast.
I also tried a flip to see if the action were better rising to the right, but I think your orientation of going down to the right has at least as much energy.
Were you in a moving vehicle? At 1/1000 I would have expected the IS II would have delivered a less soft image. I ran it through Topaz Sharpen AI, with a bit of improvement
An interesting choice to go with black and white here, John. I’m guessing this was backlit and you didn’t have much detail in giraffe? For me, the silhouette format has trouble in this image because the giraffe is in front of a dense part of the tree that disguises a good share of its outline. I do like the slopes of the image. Though Dick doesn’t see much difference, to me, the flipped version seems to have a bit more energy.
