Chameleon

[Glenn Pure]

173757
Not posted here for a while but I found this looking through my Africa shots from May last year. A nice surprise - we saw this crossing the sandy track in Chobe National Park, Botswana. My focus and DOF not ideal here - in hindsight, I should have stopped down more. So for this, I had to apply a bit of selective sharpening around the head and eye. Crop is about a quarter of the frame area.

Thanks for looking and for any comments you may have.

Technical: Canon 80D with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM (original version) at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/4000 sec, f7.1, ISO 800. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, default NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements with Neat Image NR plugin. Light dose of NR globally and some sharpening around the eye and head where I was starting to lose focus. Sharpened in PSE (Sharpness tool) after final size reduction.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Glenn. After all that work you did end up with nice sharpness on your subject and you captured a dynamic pose. The light is way bright (but probably par for the course in that location). You might try to bring out more detail in the very dark shadow. Also, I find the blurred highlights scattered throughout the background rather distracting. :S3:

[Jonathan Ashton]

Glenn I think the chameleon shows good detail, but I too am not keen on the background, it competes for attention. If this is 1/4 crop I wonder if it would look better with the whole chameleon in the frame? Possibly some surface blur behind the chameleon would help?