Alert to Danger

[Wheeler McDougal Jr.]

I took this at the end of JUne in Wyoming in the early eavening while crusing the local roads. Shooting data as follows:
Nikon D3S
2011:06:26 21:09:53
600mm
600mm (in 35mm film)
1/640 sec, f/8
Mode: Manual
Metering: Spot
ISO: 1250
AF mode: AF-C
White balance: AUTO
Flash: Off
File size: 14.7MB
Image size: 4288 x 2844
Color space: sRGB
Saturation: Normal
Sharpness: Normal
Contrast: Normal

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Wheeler - nice light and colors. Because of the direction that the in focus one is twisted I would have preferred more room on the left than on the right, also more room below for their virtual feet. If you don't have more room to the left than a square crop might work on this one.

TFS,
Rachel

[Morkel Erasmus]

Hi Wheeler, good to see you posting again.

It looks like a nice scene, but I'm afraid your chosen composition/crop does not really make the most of it. Rachel raised some good points regarding the space for the legs and the 'dead space' on the RHS. With the in-focus antelope looking over her shoulder the way he was, having more space on the LHS than RHS would have balanced the composition better. One way to get round the space at the bottom if you are at the edges of your frame, is to crop tighter so as not to look 'cut off by accident'...

How do you find this suggested repost? I would still even like to see this with a hint more space on the LHS...:)

[Hilary Hann]

Good points made by Rachel and Morkel. I like Morkel's re-post as I think the composition suits the poses in a more complimentary way. Cute pair of deer.

[Wheeler McDougal Jr.]

Thanks Morkel, Rachel and Hilary for your thoughts n my posting and especially to you Morkel for your crop. I like your ideas and have one of my own which I hope you all like. I basically moved the right side to the left and cropped off the bottom.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Nice repost Wheeler...I am glad you had the space on the LHS.

I would even crop this further. I also think that you could recover a bit more detail from the bucks with some delicate shadow/highlights work. The image is a tad grainy due to your choice of ISO (you did not state which camera you were using). Here's another suggestion based on your repost...what do you think? The pano crop places their eyes on the rule-of-thirds horizontal line which makes for a stronger composition with less 'dead space' on top.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Wheeler, a little late to this but...

Taking the original post OP the whole crop needed to be move way to the right and in your repost you have addressed that. In addition I think you could have afforded to move the crop down to, so you have a little less above and more room at the foot for the 'virtual' legs, however I think Morkels posting has perhaps offered the best solution. Shooting at such a high ISO has introduced some noise or grain, would also suggest appling some noise reduction NR to the BKG, but not to the subjects ie the deer, as this will kill any detail. A little Highlight/Shadow to the eyes & muzzle, plus a bit more warmth and hopefully things begin to take shape.

My last point Wheeler is that I noticed you have set your Colour Space in camera to sRGB. This is fine if you just want to post on the web, but does not allow you the flexibility or colour range to work on your images in Post production, so you need to set your camera to RGB, I guess you must be shooting JPEG too?

Hope this helps and look forward to more images to come.

TFS
Steve

[Wheeler McDougal Jr.]

Morkel and Steve
Thanks again for your thoughts on this image. I very much like your ideas. To answer a couple of your questions: This image was shot with a Nikon D3S. I only shoot in RAW-NEF. I did in fact set the camera to sRGB on the advice of another moderator, my other choice is Adobe RGB. I'll try that and see what I think. In this repost I used a little shadow/highlight correction as Steve suggested and I cropped a bit of the top off. I like the result. What do you guys think? Thanks again for the help.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Wheeler, yep looks good. Be careful with highlight/Shadow, it's a powerful tool that can bring/throw up other issues, plus it needs to look right. :S3: Good to know you are shooting RAW, but change the setting to RGB it will make a big difference.

Not knowing Nikon that well, I am surprised to see the level of noise in the image as I thought the D3s could handle it a lot better than Canon, in fact a very good friend has just been shooting badgers at ISO 2500 with stunning examples. Perhaps some Nikon users here might add their bit?

Steve

[peter delaney]

Hi Wheeler

I am a little late coming to the thread as well, I shoot with both Nikon D3 and D3S , I agree with Steve about SRGB , no idea why a mod would tell you to shoot in such a limited colour space.. adobe 1998 has a wider colur gamut , srgb for web only .. there are lots of threads to back up this...

Be interested to know why you are using spot metering , in this case I can see no reason to have switched from Matrix to spot .. spot measures 5 % of image in the centre only ...so if these deer bolted and the BKG changed you would end up with a very over/under exposed image.
TBH matrix will work for 95% of the time.. its that good... spot I only use for a very tricky lightening situation ...
please check your cameras menu regarding the ISO NR ... it may be turned off which might explain the noise in your image... at that iso you should be getting a very clean image with little need of NR in PP work.

[Wheeler McDougal Jr.]

Peter
Thanks so much for the information reguarding the D3S. In checking my menu itthe ISO NR was set at Normal should it be set to High? As far as the spot meter, it was simply a mastake. I was shooting a bird in a tricky lighting situation and I left the camera set to spot when I intended to return it to matrix. When I saw that I was quite surprised as I almost never us the spot meter. Thanks again for your help.