Elephant Smoochie - Mana Pools

[Douglas Bolt]

Canon 5DM3, Canon f5.6 400mm@6.3, 1/2000s, ISO 640, HH. PP: Bridge/CC. I am not sure what was going on between these two eles. Interesting behavior. Would have liked to have had a little less reach for this image.

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Douglas - nice interaction captured. Exp looks good. A busy bg but nothing you could do to avoid it. I agree with you that a bit more room all around might have been better. If it were mine, I would back off on the sharpening particularly on the trunks.

TFS,
Rachel

[Sanjeev Aurangabadkar]

Cool interaction captured Douglas. I wish the ears were not clipped & you had a wider view, but still a nice image with lots of detail and well exposed. Agree about the busy BG.

[Mark Needham]

Great interaction and nice detail (especially the tusks) - gotta love the 5D3, eh? :bg3: Agree with Rachel's and Sanjeev's comments. Looking forward to seeing more of your work!

[Nancy Bell]

Agreed this is a great moment of interaction you captured! A very nice compositional balance with the heads pretty more on the same horizontal line & plane, the tusks even in size and parallel to each other and the two trunks creating an interesting and strong vertical element. I wonder if you desaturated the bkgd some if it would make all those branches less obvious. Also when you sharpen the image be sure not to include any of those branches.

[Douglas Bolt]

This was nearly FF. I did mask the sharpening and actually added a blur layer on the background. This was one of the rare moments for me when I had a lens with too much reach.

[Andre Pretorius]

Love the texture here Douglas!

The size of the subjects in the image is not a problem to me.

Wonder what this would look like with f5,6, did you play with different f-stops?

[Douglas Bolt]

Hi Andre,

I took 7 shots in quick succession. The first couple were the only ones that had showed that nice joining of their tusks.