Home on the range

[Nancy Bell]

Cows for the cowboy/cowgirl out on the open range of northern Colorado. I used Pixel Bender oil, one setting for the brindle cow and another for the background.

I have a suggestion for a weekly theme. How about domestic animals?

[Jay Sheinfield]

Nancy, I like this a lot. Great pose and eye contact with the foreground bull. PB works so well with animals. Personally, I'd like to see the eyes of the mid-ground black bull and perhaps the antlers within the frame. It took me a minute to see the LRC calf feeding. Nice touch! Whoops, my browser was cropped, antlers are fine.

[Mitch Carucci]

Soulful cow. Nice processing too!

[denise ippolito]

Nancy, Very neat! I like the pose of the main cow and the filtering. I might evict the partial cow in the LRC and the fence posts in the BG. Another great theme image!:S3:

[Dennis Bishop]

Nice job on this, Nancy. If you draw a line along the backs of the cattle, it pretty much coincides with a horizontal divine proportion line, and that's a good thing in terms of a pleasing composition. Use of the two Pixel Bender settings was effective in separating the cow on the left from the rest of the image. I like the fact that you revealed her eyes, and I think it made sense not to do that on the others because they're part of the background.

I agree with Denise about the fence posts. Actually, I recognize that the distribution of the cattle in the background is probably related to the fence, so the posts are an integral part of the scene to me. However, people who haven't spent a lot of time around cattle likely wouldn't know that and would find the posts distracting.

[Nancy Bell]

Denise & Dennis, I really noticed those posts after I finished all the processing and also thought they should be removed since they no longer looked like much of anything. But I really didn't want to go back to the very beginning again since I liked how everything else turned out. I don't see brindle-colored cows very often and this one really caught my eye. Thank you all for looking and commenting.

[Anita Bower]

Wonderful composition! Love that brown cow looking straight at me with those big horns spreading overhead. That the other cows are black causes the brown one to stand out more. I would prefer less pixelbender in this case, but, that is just a personal preference. I wonder if you could clone out those posts? Not a biggy.