Early morning photograph of a lone Blesbuck enveloped in fog, Rietvlei Nature Reserve, Pretoria, South Africa. Canon 1DIV, EF 300 f2.8II, 1/8000, f4, ISO 800, beanbag rest. Cropped and worked up in CS6 - comments welcome.
This image portrays that early morning fog very well and creates a lovely serene mood. Very nice that the sunlight is just starting to filter through giving some color and highlights to the grasses & the silhouette of the blesbuck. I really like the minimalist composition with just the blesbuck and the soft grasses fading into the bkgd and the single golden color. I would eliminate the bit of heavy brush just intruding in the middle of the right edge.
Hi Gerhard, Rietvlei is just 20 mins from my house - I get to visit there often. I like the setting, and a cool from the blesbok. Just enough sunlight to show up some colour on the blesbok, and I do like the visible grasses. Maybe a bit off the bottom.
Yes, I would take a little off the bottom to lose some of the darker brush coming through. But keep some of the yellow grasses as I like the way it fades from yellow through to white at the top of the image. There's a bit of graininess everywhere which I might remove with a v small amount of universal NR. Very small though.
I too enjoy Rietvlei, Gerhard. It's further from me than from Stu (150km) but it's closer than where you now live...
I like the mood here. I felt you could have placed the blesbuck in a stronger spot and gotten some more contrast in there without sacrificing the morning misty mood.
In this repost I recropped to place the subject on a ROT (rule of thirds) power point, then brought the shadows slider in LEVELS back up to where the histogram begins and took the midtone slider to the left to about 1.30 - then took down saturation slightly as the levels adjustment augmented it too much. Lastly I added LCE using Unsharp Mask (see the sticky thread in the main wildlife forum for details on how to do this).