Wildlife Image of the Week for the week ending May 30th, 2014: Thinus Schoeman

07-15-2014, 01:59 PM #1

Daniel Cadieux

Super Moderator

Wildlife Image of the Week for the week ending May 30th, 2014: Thinus Schoeman - Zebra scuffle

Attached Images

Congratulations Thinus!

Hi, I got hammered a bit (in a good way of course) when I posted the elephant image a few weeks ago. Well I'm back to have another go.
On our recent visit to the Kruger National Park, I spent a lot of time late afternoons at the Mooiplaas waterhole near Mopani camp in the northern parts of the Park.
The waterhole is visited by a variety of game, and especially the zebras were regular visitors. The zebras often got involved in scuffles, and I managed to capture this image of two zebras kicking up dust while being less than friendly with each other. The image was taken late afternoon and I was shooting a bit against the light that was left.

I edited the image in LR5. The image was cropped a bit on the right hand side as well as the top.
The adjustment brush was used to selectively reduce the clarity on the background from about halfway up.
I upped the exposure, contrast and clarity, and lifted the shadows. I upped the saturation a tad, but I didn't adjust anything to the colours.
I applied sharpening after resizing, and applied noise reduction.

Thanks for looking, and all critique and comments welcome!