Antarctic Fur Seal

[Andreas Liedmann]

Another fur seal for your critical eyes,
this guy was moving on the edge of the king penguin colony and was causing a lot of trouble amongst them.Sometimes it looked like he /she was having a lot of fun , while running after the penguins, making a chaos on the edge of the colony.

In this case the seal was running down a slope !!!!! away from another slightly bigger seal, they have been chasing each other.

Not happy about the colors, looking kind of bronze in the fur of the seal, but the raw file looks the same . so i left it, i mage taken in Auto WB.

So if there is Mr Detail , out there , suggestion for correction please, or leave it as fact , and looking good to all of your eyes.

Help is appreciated.

Canon EOS 1D MK IV

EF 500 IS L ; Tripod.

ISO 2000 ;;F 5,6 ; 1/800sec

Processed in RPP and PS ; made use of this wonderful sharpening script :w3 i just start to work with.Levels , curves ; LCE all locally with lum masks.

Cropped slightly from RHS and bottom for comp.

Crits appreciated , thanks for watching.

Cheers Andreas

[Anette Mossbacher]

Hi Andreas, love the this seal and details. Especially the sand on the LHS flying up, but that white thing whatever that is right under the flying sand is a bit disturbing. Well just me :))

ciao Anette

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Andreas - great walking pose and I really like how the texture of the fur comes through. Color looks ok to me but you are a better judge of whether it is natural. Only small point is whether you can open up the shadows under the nose any more.

TFS,
Rachel

[Brendon Cremer]

Great image and nice low angle, agree that a little opening up of the shadows and possible the mid tones may help a little. I also feel that despite the fact that the seal was going down a slope a bit of rotation to level things out will work well

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Andreas,
Agree on suggestions above on white thingy and opening up the dark areas a bit. Love the low angle as well......but what sets this one apart for me is the BG penguins!!! Just enough in focus to know what they are but non intrusive and gives an extra dimension of depth. Minor tweaks will make this awesome!

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi folks , thanks for your appreciated comments and suggestions for improvement.

Followed them by opening up the mid tones by 5 points and lightened the area under the chin and side of the neck.Also removed the white peace of bone on the ground on LHS.

Hope that helped, for me it does.

Brendon -- i do see no reason for rotation , because the subject was running slowly downhill , so naturally movement and it looked unleveled , so i leave it.

Thanks for watching , Andreas

OOPs i forgot the image

[Shreyas Mantri]

Andreas, your repost works well for me. I personally wouldn't mind the bone as it's a good representation of the habitat they live in.
TFS

[Anette Mossbacher]

Hi Andreas,

your repost looks good :w3

[Andreas Liedmann]

Thanks Anette and Shreyas for your comments .

[Morkel Erasmus]

Andreas your repost has opened it up nicely. Good IQ at high ISO especially for a dark subject, though in the RP is see some noise in in the seal but it looks well contained.
I don't mind the diagonal - adds some nice dynamic to the shot with the movement and flying dirt.

[Andreas Liedmann]

Thanks Morkel , i do not see any noise. where ?

[Steve Kaluski]

The RP is better Andreas for all the right reasons, taking on board the various replies & observations. The 'jaunty' angle is different and I quite like it, as I thought this was deliberate, I didn't see that it was on an angle. Can't see the bone had anything to play within the shot, so I think it's better that you 'picked it up' and took it out of shot. I might have cropped a fraction more off the top, just below the darkest bob on the right, just seems to have a cleaner edge to me, but...

TFS
Steve