I haven't seen any hippo posts since becoming active on BPN - perhaps too common for most to bother with? I believe this one is giving us a threat display although we were parked some distance off the edge of this waterhole in Kruger area of South Africa. For this crop, I've taken a whisker off the bottom and a little off the right edge of the original frame only. I've lifted shadows and increased mid tone contrast on the hippo.
Thanks for looking and any comments you may have.
Technical: Canon 80D with Lens EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 400mm handheld. Manual exposure 1/400, f7.1, ISO 800 - could have gone to higher ISO and shutter speed here but action well frozen anyway. Processed in Canon DPP 4 (digital lens optimiser @ 50, Sharpness = 3, crop, lighting adjustments, default NR) then exported 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop Elements. Sharpened (sharpness function: remove Gaussian blur) after final size reduction.
Hi Glenn-- Nice timing on this one , those fangs look menacing. Not sure on the framing though, i might have preferred a vertical frame and providing a bit more space at the top. Nice choice on DOF , might have gone for say f 9 and higher iso as another option .
Hi Glenn - Nice timing and it is good to see a hippo. Sharpness and pov work. Personally, I think you've gone a bit too far in lifting the shadows. If it were mine I would add some depth to the midtones and also drop the blues on the body. I also would prefer more room above.
Good and sharp and great timing. Not so happy with the crop, I think a little more on top would help and a little off the RHS, I don't really think the long back is adding anything.
Thank you all for your comments. I have redone this being less aggressive on the shadows and tightening the crop: nothing left at the top of the frame though to fix that side of things. I think this is better, so very grateful for your input.
Hi Glenn what a great yawn ...this guy did a great job for you guys .
Love the wide open mouth and the crop works quite well , a bit more at the top would not hurt .
Colors do look ok ....but can be interpreted differently
OP and RP are looking both flat in the subject form my POV .....in this kind of situation i think Steve would say . " No form " in the subject
So i took the liberty of bringing in some form .... just two adjustments layers and two different blend modes at x % opacity . One layer blurred for the detail . Worked from your RP
Wonderful pose from this hippo and I like the HA as well as detail inside that wide-open mouth. From the compositional POV the RP works for me, although I do wish for a little more at the top of the frame.
Colours look natural and Andreas's RP adds a little more depth and realistic look to the subject in terms of lighting.
Love the sense of "imminent danger" you have managed to capture here. The profile of this animal is quite striking and inspires a sense of power. I really enjoyed viewing, thank you so much for sharing dear Glenn, wonderful work
Thank you all for your comments and Andreas for the repost. Yes, I keep getting caught out on the 'flat' look. Maybe one day I will improve there but at present the change is subtle enough for me to not really notice or look for this little extra improvement. Give me time and wish me luck.
Hi Glenn, having the jaws open is a huge plus, as it illustrates the colossal size and the 'fighting/defensive' tusks they have. As I've said before, any action or fast moving subjects may cause issue because of the limited ISO range and low light, although 1/400 appears ok, but I would certainly like to have seen it more around the 1/1600 and perhaps a tad more DoF because of the close proximity and depth of the subject. If you shot head on you would be looking at perhaps f/11 - f/14. I do like the trailing water from the front of the mouth, but overall it just looks a bit 'flat' and having the pale backdrop isn't great, so picking up on colour and the texture helps with a subject like this. Might have been better face on and shooting portrait, rather than being slightly angle (in an ideal world), but it's towards you rather than away which helps. Overall it's just too tight and with the zoom it does allow you scope, plus your guide should know the signs for when they may yawn which aids to capturing the shot.
Just using Exposure masks, some selective colour, saturation and bringing out the texture from the face all plays apart and is in the original capture (OP). The other RP's are just too dark and there is no 'life' to the subject, plus I still cannot see why NR is applied to an ISO800 shot????
Thanks Steve. I appreciate your efforts to rework this and will take a look at it again.
Originally Posted by Steve Kaluski
...plus I still cannot see why NR is applied to an ISO800 shot????
As mentioned, I've posted a thread on why I do this. You are right though, it isn't needed on an ISO 800 image, at least at the size shown here, as no noise is going to be visible. But NR with Neat Image, if done correctly, does no harm either and is part of my standard workflow. It does have one benefit as well. It reduces file size substantially: there is a vast amount of information needed to record noise in a jpg file. By applying NR, even on an apparently low noise image, I can generate a substantially smaller file and therefore apply much less compression to get the file under 400KB needed for this site. As you know, using less compression is a good thing as it can introduce can otherwise introduce artefacts.
FYI when I export for a web image, the 16bit tiff file can be anywhere from 987MB to 1.8GB and it sails through at 400ppi no problem.
Perhaps we should take this to private exchange but I'm not clear on your point here Steve? A file with even a small amount of noise, especially with a smooth background, will be a **lot** smaller when the noise is largely eliminated. It's a result of the way JPG compression works. More noise = more information to encode = bigger file. So for an image 1200 pixels wide, one with NR versus one without, the NR file will be a lot small at any JPG compression I chose to compare. Not sure where a TIFF file or the display resolution is relevant here? I'm simply referring to the final downsized jpg and its file size in kilobytes with and without NR.
Glenn, it was only in relation to cropping from the original and compression, size, IQ etc, no need I think to pursue this as you say, but always good to have additional info for others.
My, what big teeth you have
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Originally Posted by Steve Kaluski
