Learning the Ropes

Image Critiques Wildlife Critiques
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I just landed at LAX 40 something hours ago after spending the past two weeks at home in Indonesia to visit my parents and relatives. I have been making this trip annually ever since I came to the US in 2009 but only when I started working five years ago that I was able to squeeze in a small side trip to photograph the wildlife and landscape of Indonesia during my vacation.

I was born in Borneo so a big chunk of my photography work in Asia has been from that island but this time, I visited a different island to photograph the orangutans. This is hands down one of my favorite from the trip. This young Sumatran orangutan (as opposed to the Bornean one) was born to a semiwild mom (meaning she had been released back to the wilderness after a successful rehabilitation) in the wild. We suspect this guy is about 4-5 years old. He is starting to go out and explore the branches alone even though he will come back to the mom every few minutes.

All feedbacks are welcome. I am particularly interested in your inputs on the bright highlights on the hairs. I have done a faux HDR by combining a darker exposure from the same file. Shooting in the rainforest is tough because I am pretty much always under the canopy. But from time to time, the sun can penetrate through thinner foliage and you just have to deal with it.

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Recropped and cleaned up:

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_DSC1635-Edit-r800×1200 282 KB

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@adhikalie

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Beautiful frame, nicely balanced and I like the expressions.
It may benefit from slight overall darkening of the frame.

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This is a nice frame of that little fellow, Adhika. Thanks for sharing the story of his upbringing. The exposure looks fine to me, although monitors and ambient light can of course vary. This would work quite well with a slight crop off the top to exclude the bottoms of the leaves, and because this tike is looking downward as well. Welcome back, and I look forward to seeing more.

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Thanks, @JRajput and @Bill_Leggett! Good call about the top leaves, Bill! I will play with that a little more.

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Very nice image. The highlights frame the beast well, only see one small patch of fixable white. You got the face in even light, the body is in a great position, the tree and leaves are in the right places.
These shots are difficult, many things went very well here at once.
Crop from top and bottom.
TY for post

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Thanks, Steven!

I made a slight crop from the upper left corner to address what @Bill_Leggett mentioned about the bottoms of the leaves. I cleaned up a few distracting elements and brighten up the face slightly. The modification is added to the original post above. Thanks for the kind suggestions!

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Very cute shot :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: - In these conditions I expose for the highlights and then play with shadows/blacks/darks in Lightroom until I get the right exposure back (i.e. exactly like the scene that you saw with your eyes but that your camere didn’t manage to capture). The higher the dynamic range of your camera, the more play you have with this kind of situation.
Grt, Ingrid.

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Thanks, @Ingrid_Vekemans! I am glad you like this guy. One of the hardest thing about adjusting for the tonality here is that very quickly it looks like one of those “shitty HDR” look that I am trying to adjust. That’s what happened in most of the pictures in this series of burst but I am glad this one turns out quite well to my eyes.