Young Alpine Marmots fighting

[Markus Jais]

Young Alpine Marmots fighting. This is not a serious fight and probably more play than fight.

Austria, Hohe Tauern National Park.

As this place the marmots are pretty safe as there are always people. No Golden Eagle would go there.

EOS 1DX, EF 4/200-400L IS 1.4x at 225mm. f5.6, 1/1000.
ISO 1000.

Increased blacks and shadows a bit in LR 5 and some smart sharpen in PS CC.

Markus

[Rachel Hollander]

Markus - It looks more like an embrace than a fight but I'll take your word on the action. Nice sharpness and detail with a pleasant bg. I'm wondering if a portrait comp would work here.

TFS,
Rachel

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi Markus,
nice play fight shot with a pleasing BG and nicely framed.Good low POV.

I do feel you used SS too heavy , would lower the opacity, because grass in FG and the fur looks a bit over sharpened for me.
Overall image looks too light and too thin in the mid tones , easy to fix. Red channel is blown in the highlights, watch the histogram or look at the individual channels in PS there is not much detail in the red channel visible.
Think the overcast sky helped with exposure here.

TFS Andreas

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Markus, personally I feel if you go for a central position then perhaps a vertical format might have given you a better option, going landscape I would have put then off centre, just helps I feel, the low POV just works nicely. I love the BKG colours, however I agree with Andreas about the sharpness & tone, just looks too crunchy. If you drop the Blue in saturation, add a Mid tone overall and then a luminosity adjustment for the FG grass it just gives the image much more depth/tone and the colours look far better, just my take.

The ones I saw last week scurried away so quickly, but they had 'orange' colouring to the coat too, that's the Swiss for you. :S3:

TFS
Steve

[Girish Prahalad]

lovely interaction with excellent poses. comp works for me as presented.
just a bit oversharpened as pointed out.

[Steve Canuel]

I've seen lots of pictures of this kind of interaction but have never witnessed it myself. Agree its a little over sharpened but I like the interaction, the BG, and the centered comp as posted. Another nice one of this species.

[dankearl]

Sharpening is an easy fix.
This is one of the best Marmot images I have seen....

[edwardselfe]

Nice image - would give it a bit more warmth with WB or a boost in red/yellow saturation.
Ed

[Andre Pretorius]

Like the POV, agree about sharpness( very guilty myself?). Think vertical crop would have more impact- they would be "in your face".

[Markus Jais]

Thanks for all the comments. Learned a lot.

@Andreas: I saw the red channels in LR and PS. I never checked for red as there is no red in the image. Again something learned.

I tried vertical crops and they look good but I still prefer the horizontal here. I also had an (out of focus) shot where the marmots are off center to the left. That didn't work for me because it is two of them facing each other. I think this works best with a central composition. With a single marmot I normally place them off center.

Markus

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi Markus,
in general, if i can say that , the red channel is the lightest, the green takes the contrast and the blue is good for nothing.You can try by deleting all the different channels in PS and you will see , which channel carries the most data.

For example select the blue channel and curve it by taking the slider for the blacks and push it to the opposite direction you will get a slightly lighter image with less contrast, if you do the same with the green channel you will end up with a mess in tones, i forgot you have to set blend mode of the layer to luminosity.

If you have blown channel like the red in this case, just copy the blue into red via APPLY IMAGE set to luminosity, all made on a BG copy.So you can recover some detail that you have lost in one channel and use the detail from another.

Hope that helps.

Andreas

[Steve Kaluski]

Andreas could you not use the 'finger pointer' in Curves, select the area of blue area in the image, then use the up & down keys?

[Andreas Liedmann]

Hi Mr Detail,
think it takes too long to discuss this here, i was not referring only to this image , just general for helping blown channels to recover some of the details .
Drop you a mail, if you want.