Memphis Zoo, two one year old Giraffes interacting with each other. I used photoshop to select the subjects, inverse the selection, and used an adjustment layer to lower the background exposure until it went black.
Any/all
Any/all
Canon 5D Mk IV, Canon 100 -400mm + 1.4 teleconverter = 560mm
1/400 f8.0 ISO 800
Wonderful interaction, Michael and excellent detail in the subjects. I’m not sure, but I think a touch more canvas above the ears might make the composition even better. The only processing issue I see is that your selection was slightly off on the underside of the right giraffe’s neck. I don’t know the details of your processing, but when I select the subject for something like this, I’ll copy it to a new layer, then I can do anything as sloppily as I want to the background and I won’t hurt the subject. In a case like this, I would just take the eraser tool on the subject layer and carefully remove those little extra pieces the selection picked up. If you don’t have the subject separated, a bit of careful burning to those areas should do the trick.
This is a gorgeous image. Thanks for posting to the Human and Fauna forum, and I look forward to seeing more of your work here.
Exceptional image with intimate, loving interaction!
It’s always tempting to crop tightly around such wonderful subjects, but here, I think more room all around would improve this even further- ot at least on the top and bottom, which would be easy.
Enlarging the sides (if you don’t already have the pixels in the original file) would be a little tougher, but Content-Aware would do the trick.
I think you could also brighten and define the eyes a bit more with the “brightness/contrast” and “levels” sliders.
Just love this image !
Sandy
This is such a wonderful image, I thought I’d play with it a bit - it’s the first time I’ve done this, and hope you don’t mind.
I added a bit of canvas all around with the content-aware fill, and worked on the eyes to define them more.
This is what I came up with, still constrained to a small image.
IMO, this is a winner in selected online contests, if you’re interested - contact me.
Sandy
Dennis, thanks for taking the time to look and comment. It pays to have some eyes on because I never noticed the selection artifact, I will fix that. Also good suggestion about more space at the top. Thanks, Michael
Sandy,
The interaction is what I love. I will look at the eyes, good suggestion. Thanks for taking the time. Michael
Sandy,
Thanks for the example. I do like the extra space around the composition. Michael
congrats on the WP !!
I was very serious about this being a winner in other select photo contests - let me know if you have any interest and would like some direction. or ideas.
Sandy
This is so precious, and would make a wonderful card. Congrats on being picked for a yearly award. I missed it when it was originally posted.
Congrats Michael–Awesome photo…Jim
