From my truck. I went out to Eastern Oregon for a short week of photography. Pronghorn are common out there but aren't often approachable. This young antelope* was very curious about me and what I was doing and kept coming closer and closer until I thought he was going to stick his head in my window. This shot is very slightly cropped for composition.
This is my first post to wildlife so criticize away!
Not bad for a large crop and I like the clean bg and detail on the front of the face although I wish you had more dof. I feel you could improve this image by toning down the brightness a bit, adding NR to the bg and adding a little more room to the top if you have it.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I hadn't actually noticed the banding in the bg until you said something - that's actually what happens when you apply nr too aggressively on the color channels, turns out. I reprocessed the image from scratch using a totally different method. I wasn't really happy with the highlights and I think the original was too orange - a result of too much shadows/highlights adjustment. Also, confused by your large crop comment? This is nearly full frame...
Nice potrait. Cheryl made some good points esp about the DOF. Your snout is nice and sharp but you appear to be losing a little bit of the sharpness on the eyes which is the most important part of your subject. For wildlife standing still, you could easily have given yourself less speed and a smaller aperture. It depends on how much time you had between the animal jumping around and standing still for you. RP works better but I would try to sharpen around the eye area a tad more.
Hi Steve and welcome to the wildlife forum. This is certainly an in your face portrait and the comp of the rp is an improvement. There seems to be a degradation of IQ in the whites on the side of the face, almost a silvery effect that often occurs with a very aggressive approach to attempting to recover highlights. Did you have to do a lot of recovery? What pp program are you using? Looking forward to seeing more of your images here in wildlife.
Marina - Thanks for the DOF comments. I generally shoot wide open or a half stop less for birds and it didn't even occur to me to stop down for this much larger animal. It looked sharp all the way through in the LCD :) I'll definitely be keeping that in mind for future opportunities.
Rachel - Yes, I struggled with the highlights. They aren't technically blown in the histo but it was proving to be very challenging to bring them down naturally. I used Shadows/Highlights adjustment with selective masking in the original; for the repost I used a luminosity mask and Curves. Neither way seemed ideal but the latter was better I think. I'm using CS6. I'm open to suggestions on different techniques that might be more subtle.
Welcome here Steve. Some good points raised already. Your repost addressed my initial thoughts which you echoed - too yellow and too contrasty.
Rachel made a good observation on the whites...(why are we here again, Steve? )
I think you could tease out a bit more detail in the nose/mouth and eyes?
Looking forward to more posts and also your critiques on the posts of others - that's how we all grow and have fun here.