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Early AM, partly cloudy, sun behind a ridge. Encountered doe and her fawn in heavy sage brush. The f11 setting was an attempt to increase the depth of field inorder to get both the doe and fawn in focus. The fawn didn't cooperate.
Nikon D200, Nikkor 200-400mm, f11, 1/30, iso 400, focal length 280mm, tripod. Post processing ACR, PSCS3 minor levels, hue sat., sel color, selective sharpening of doe, selective noise reduction bg.
Gary - considering the tough shooting conditions, the result looks pretty good. Has this been heavily cropped? (The IQ of the deers fur seems low, but your choice of focal length would suggest it is not...)
A few post-processing items I would look at: There is a heavy blue cast to the shot - I would definitely look at shifting the colour to the yellow (i.e. based on your information, I assume this was shot in RAW, so I would raise your colour temperature there). I also find the shot to be quite contrasty considering the shaded conditions - I would look at cutting it down to highlight those midtones in the deer's coat (again, I would do it as part of the RAW conversion).
Jeff thanks for critique. Two pieces of info not in original post. Used fill flash SB900 - 2.0 EV and a 1.4 TC.
Gary, this is very interesting. Normally, I'd probably tell you to go with a lower aperture but I rather like it like this as it makes me feel like the deer is part of the scenery in the image - and that's usually the case! I like how the brush in front of him leads your eye to his - it's very effective.
What I think needs some work is the color cast and I'd also try to select just the deer and bring his details out some more and then select just the BG and try to darken it a bit so the eye goes right to that beautiful face.
I also noticed that the fur is not quite as detailed as it should be - do you know what size crop this is?
Jules and Jeff, I tried to incorperate your suggests. There is an improvement in the repost. The crop was approximately 50%. Thank you for the critique and suggestions.
Much better! Isn't it amazing what a few small changes can do for an image? You've made the most of this one, Gary.
Very nice habitat shot. Great look on the deer and i really like the various colors of the FG & BG. The re-post is a big improvement over the OP.
Peter
Very nice Gary - the repost looks much better.
The correction to white balance made a huge differerence. Turned a nice capture to a good capture.
