Moose Portrait

[John Blumenkamp]

Lately I've been pretty busy with things in my life outside of photography, but I have been visiting the forums and enjoying all the great posts as much as possible. The past few days I sorted and organized some images from this past summer/fall, and liked this particular one... this was captured in August up in the mountains east of Salt Lake City one evening after work. This pretty lady gave me a few typical inquisitive moose stares, and this was one of my favorites.

40D w/ 400 5.6L
1/50 f/5.6 iso400 w/tripod

Thanks for looking,
John

[Alfred Forns]

John I'm always amazed how close you guys get to the moose !!! She sure is giving you the eye !!!

I like the framing and precise focusing Excellent feel Just wish I could see the other eye better !!! Big Congrats !!!

[Sabyasachi Patra]

John,
I agree that she was more than inquisitive. :-)

I like the bush on the left and then the diffused bg in the back. I would have prefered a f8 aperture for her. May be a higher ISO as well as you were already down to 1/50. Overall I like this image.
Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Steve Canuel]

Nice comp and colors, and yes, she's lovely (as far as moose go). Her right eyeball looks a little unnatural to me (lightened seperately from the rest of the face?) although the rest of that side of the face looks quite good/natural.

[DanWalters]

I like the comp and colors. Nice eye contact as well.

[Julie Kenward]

I like the image, too. You really caught a moose in a sweet portrait. I wonder if you tried a shadow/highlight adjustment to bring that other eye and the chest/side out a bit more in detail?

[Robert Amoruso]

John,

Like the comp with the bush on right and OOF BG on left as Sabyasachi mentioned.

On the eye, it does look a little funky. I downloaded the image and tried to get better tonal separation but with the JPG, nothing there to work with. The RAW should give you better results. Use a curves or levels to lighten it some and then use a separate curves to add contrast. If you are OK with such things, you could do a selection on the right eye and surrounding area, Copy to layer, flip it horizontally, move it over the left eye and erase the part not needed. I tried it and it looks good.

Of course that is your own personal decision on that type of change to the image and I will not even post what I did as I do not know how you feel about such things.

I will routinely select eyes, do some curves work on them to make them more prominent and then lightly sharpen them to make them more pronounced.

I did try selective sharpening the head, ears and nose to better affect. Might want to try that.

[John Blumenkamp]

Thanks for all the comments and ideas... they are great appreciated!