Ocelot

Image Critiques Everything Else Critiques
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Ocelot
Ocelot2000Ă—1333 972 KB

This is a photo from the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson. This was a rare sighting for me. I have been to the Museum several and have only seen the ocelot once. I was quite excited to see the ocelot and only had a few moments to enjoy the sighting.

Type of Critique Requested

  • Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
  • Emotional: Feedback on the emotional impact and artistic value of the image.
  • Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.

Specific Feedback and Self-Critique

My focus was on the face. The face is sharp but the body is soft which doesn’t necessarily bother me but may detract from the image. Should I darken the right side of the body to more closely match the rest of the body? The image looks like a house cat. It’s a beautiful animal, would it be more impactful to show an image that shows the full body patterns and colors?

Technical Details

Nikon D850 70-200mm, 200mm, ISO 800, 1/640, F5.6. Minimal editing in LRC

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Welcome to NPN, Marsha, and I like your bobcat very much. I’ve never seen one, but this does not look like a house cat to me. The size and shape of the ears and the cave-like environment strongly suggest a wild animal, as does the wary look in its eyes. I do think a little darkening of its left side of the face (including the ear) would raise this to feline perfection. I’m really looking forward to your future posts, and wonder if you’ll stick with mammals or show us something in a different category. Well done!

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Welcome, Marcia!! What a pretty kitty, with wonderful eyes! I love the sharp detail. I think the tonalities on the animal are fine, but I’d try to burn the bright area in the FG rock. Might be pretty effective with the selection tools we have these days. I could see taking a little off both sides but that’s purely a personal preference.

Looking forward to seeing more from you!

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Welcome, Marsha. Very nice capture but actually, it is a bobcat.

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Welcome, Marsha! I hope you find NPN as good as I have… making the effort to post and critique others has been very useful. A very kind and gentle way to learn a lot.

As for this cat…I always look for the story and this tells a great one of hiding/camouflaging in the desert rocks. I love the dark shadows to the sides that help to frame the cat, and the shadows on the face seem natural to me.

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Hi Marsha and welcome to NPN :slight_smile:

Very, very nice image!

The main focus on the face is great and IMHO, the DOF is great as well, the fur on it’s chest and front legs is reasonably sharp as it should be. I think that a progressive sharp focus on the face to slightly out of focus on the body helps to show depth, and in this case, depth into the cave dwelling.

I don’t think so, it looks natural to me the way it is on the right side.
I recommend that you to consider doing a little work on the left side though.

I made a few minor adjustments to your image to demonstrate why I said that.

You had good results at ISO 800 in this image but in my opinion, removing what little noise there is allows you to bring up more details in the shaded area to the left so I opened it up in Topaz Photo AI (Of course, you may not have any form of “Denoise Software” so this may be a limiting factor for you).
After reducing the noise, I created a mask in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), on the shaded area of the cat’s body, then increased the exposure slightly, increased the highlights a fair amount and finally, reduced the saturation, I reduced the saturation so the now brighter body would blend in better with the brighter portion at the chest.
Next, I created another mask using object selection on the foreground rock using ACR, then reduced the exposure there by only -.15.
Next, I reduced the exposure of the entire image but only by a slight amount (I think it was -.05).

The denoise process and raising the shadows revealed three or four tiny bright specs so I removed those with spot heal in ACR.

Note: I didn’t want to target reducing the brightness of the “In the sun” portion of the rock in the front because that might have meant having to adjust the brightness of the refection in it’s eyes as well, just something to consider when editing if you choose to.

I attempted to brighten the little spike like tuft of fur on the tips of its ears but it didn’t seem to look right so I left it alone.

Something I noticed that I found neat was how the rock above its head seemed to have been carved out to mimic the shape of its head and ears, the ears in particular :slight_smile:

The adjustments I made are only suggestions for you to consider, and, trying to convey my thoughts with text only would have too hard for me in this case, so I did the example edit. :slight_smile:
On that note, anytime you have a detailed suggestion for someone else, a suggestion that’s too difficult to say in text, you can do the same as I did here, just hit “Download” at the bottom of their image. Neat way to share ideas and examples isn’t it :slight_smile:

Sorry for the long winded response! :slight_smile:

Original Version (below).

Ocelot
Ocelot2000Ă—1333 972 KB

Adjustments Version (below)
Ocelot - Marsha Cummings - Minor Masking Adjustments
Ocelot - Marsha Cummings - Minor Masking Adjustments2000Ă—1333 731 KB

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Oops, wrong file. Thanks for pointing it out.

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I keep coming back to this for some reason, I think it’s the facial expression. That, and it’s an awesome capture :slight_smile:
The look is almost as if it’s saying something like: “Oh great, another cyclops”

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This is very helpful. Thank you. I don’t use ACR but may check it out. I like the changes you made. I have Topaz Denoise but didn’t use it here. My tendency is to do as little editing as possible, mostly because I’m not well versed. I’m here to learn so thank you for your feedback.

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HI Marsha,

ACR comes with Ps and it’s almost identical to LrC, but with less fine tuning controls when compared to LrC.
I use ACR while in Ps when I do member edit suggestions, otherwise, I use LrC.

I completely understand wanting to do as little post processing as possible. That approach helps to be more deliberate when shooting and it shows that you are a deliberate shooter.

The adjustments I did certainly aren’t needed, they were more of a fine tuning thing really.

Well done!
And welcome aboard :slight_smile:

P.S. There are lots of fine folks here with tons of experience with post processing and all are willing to share their knowledge.
All you need to do is ask for something fairly specific and I’m sure someone will help in any way they can.

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Welcome to NPN, Marsha. Thanks for posting this image and congratulations on selecting the correct forum. Lots of old timers mess up on this one. I like the image as posted. Probably a lot of us would tweak it a bit, but most of them would be slightly different. I like to add a touch of light to the face of the subject and increase the microcontrast a bit using an old non-AI Topaz plugin on the subject to make it stand out from the background slightly. However, the way those rocks frame the face is perfect and the subject stands out beautifully.

Again, welcome to the site and I look forward to your future posts and your comments on other’s images.