Busy Beaver

[Mack Hicks]

Looking for moose along the Gros Ventre River in Grand Teton and found this guy instead. He is building a **** across a side channel of the river but was eating a late dinner before getting to work.

Adding wetlands aids our feathered friends.

D800 600 f/4 VR II ISO 800 f/4 1/80, tripod mounted with remote

LR4 with Nik plugins, cropped about a third

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Mack - Nice to see another underrepresented animal in the forum. The beaver seems to be lacking contrast and looks like it may have been lightened a bit in pp. I would apply a midtone curves adjustment to give it a bit more pop. I would have preferred less room to the left and more to the right because the beaver is angled and looking to the right. Since you said this is cropped perhaps you have more room on the right that you can add back. I like that we can see the rocks at the bottom through the water. I think this probably could have benefited from a bit more dof as well. I understand with the D800 you can crank up the ISO a bit more. What were the lighting conditions? I'm guessing from your techs that there was not a lot of available light.

TFS,
Rachel

[Brendon Cremer]

Nice image Mack, good to see a different animal posted. The exposure looks good to me and i like the inclusion of the water, i just feel there is a little too much water on the left and im looking for more on the right. i would also perhaps look at a more pano style crop losing some space off the top and bottom. The Beaver looks to have good detail but could do with a little more sharpening possibly. Colour wise all looks good, i just see a slight magenta / blue cast in the image.

[Stan Cunningham]

Really like the activity Mack and angle of shot. I agree with Rachel on adding some contrast and I think it could use another round of sharpening as well.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Mack, great to see a different species and these are great characters, love them, hate them you have to admire their construction skills.

There are some issues straight away with the image Mack and that is the Magenta & Blues coming through, very visible so may I ask, do you calibrate your screen and if so when was it done as this will help avoid issues like this. If you get the balance right you will also notice better clarity and no pun intended, but the water is clearer too. Also finding a mid grey point with the eyedropper in LR will also bolster in getting a better colour balance. The location is quite busy with distracting bits, nothing you can do, but looking at an alternative crop can help to reduce things. Adding some more sharpening to the subject also helps, likewise increasing the ISO for greater SS.

Obviously the RAW will be better, but hope this illustrates my point.

TFS
Steve

[Mack Hicks]

Thanks for your comments. This original post was from my laptop which is hard to tell colors and fine detail, I can never seem to get the reflection right. I do not recall how much sharpening that I did, but agree I could have done more. The crop was done so I did not cut off the tail which is visible under the water. I did gradients to darken both the water at the bottom and the rocks at the top. Looking at the tint slider on the raw image it was at +5 and moving it to zero does remove the magenta cast. I chose this image because of the eye contact and the detail in the forefeet. I had just shot a lot segment of video, and the video is much brighter.