The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
This was from a few years ago in the East side of Zion NP. There were four rams following a ewe around and every now and then they would just turn around and whack each other. Not sure how they each knew when the other was going to take a shot, but they both seemed to hold up their end of the brawl pretty well. This is the biggest collision I was able to catch on camera.
Specific Feedback
Thanks every0one for your comments and recommendations. I finally got around to reworking this one and I hope it is a bit better than it started out.
It was tough mid-day light, they just decided to go into the shade to crack skulls, and I had to work pretty hard to get a reasonable image out of this without blowing out the sand, while trying to get some definition in the rams. I darkened the BG some to try to get a little separation while pushing back the highlights and whites and lightening the shadows significantly. I also added a touch of canvas to the left side of the image as the back foot of the ram in back was right at the edge of the canvas.
Technical Details
Canon 5D Miii, f9, 1/500 sec, iso 800, 560 mm (100-400/1.4 TC)
Hi Ed. I’m still new to this version of NPN however I know how frustrating it is when no one can be bothered to post a comment.
This is more an action shot in a high dynamic range environment so therefore perfect composition and exposure is difficult to manage so kudos to you for capturing it.
The processing that you mentioned needed to bring out the image has left it with a slightly HDR look to my eye. FG is quite bright and therefore a bit of a distraction.
Still a good documentary image showing what these animals get up to.
@mark28 bless you for commenting on a wildlife image in this forum. I agree with you 100 % that there aren’t enough comments posted here in this category. It is odd since it used to be one of the busiest and easiest categories to comment on. That was years ago before it changed to the current format and while I was still active. Happy to be back now and I’m committed to making more comments even if they are pretty basic. Thank you for your support.
Ed: you did well to capture and process this image which you indicate that you took in difficult lighting condiltions. My only suggestion would be to burn the very bright foreground and maybe back off on the sharpening a bit.
I can almost hear the crash. I agree with @Richard_Sandor about darkening the foreground. I think that will make a significant change. I am not sure about decreasing the sharpness of the rams. The BG could be less sharp. Ed , I took the liberty of seeing if I could do what I just suggested. Here is what I did using the Beta Depth Blur which blurred the foreground as well as the BG so I masked that layer to limit the blurring to the BG. Then I used the TK9 luminosity mask to issolate the FG and darkened that area. I did crop out most of the lower part of the frame and some of the background which makes more of a pano crop. I desaturated the rams just a small amount. Sorry, Ed. I did get carried away with the processing. I took it as a challenge and got going and couldn’t stop.
