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Thread: Pronghorn Portrait

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    Default Pronghorn Portrait



    1DMIV
    600mm f/6.3
    ISO 800
    1/2500

    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 actually an antelope

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    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.

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    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...

    repost:

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    Lifetime Member Marina Scarr's Avatar
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    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.
    Marina Scarr
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    Lifetime Member Rachel Hollander's Avatar
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    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.

    TFS,
    Rachel

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    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.

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    BPN Member Morkel Erasmus's Avatar
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    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.
    Morkel Erasmus

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