Walrus on ice

[Gerald Kelberg]

No trip to Svalbard is complete without a Walrus and this impressive beast was happily chilling out all alone until we passed by in the zodiac. Overcast skies in the late evening; a nice quiet spot on the sea ice and a glacier coming down into the bay.

The shot was taken with my Sony A9II and FE200-600 at 300mm. Shutter speed at 1/1000 sec at f/9.0 and ISO 1250.

In Lightroom, I cropped for composition, set Adobe Standard profile and adjusted the White Balance for true colours, then ran Define to clean up the small amount noise. Then added some sharpening to the eye and output to PS to resize and sharpen for output.

Comments and suggestions are always very welcome.

Gerald

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Gerald, this is a very nice capture, techs look spot on, the low POV is good from the zodiac, but I thunk just a fraction up so the horizon isn't clipping the head. The backdrop adds context to the location. It's pin sharp with good detail, but to me the colour appears off, a slight green hue to it all.

I'm not doing a repost, but its there, I just think bringing up the saturation (selectively) on the subject, opening up the darks and darkening the FG water just brings so much more to the capture, I think you could be very surprised in what you have.

TFS
Steve

[Steve Kaluski]

Gerald, just looked, if you used Enhance then you shouldn't need Define. When Enhance is launched as the first thing you do after import, you can adjust the % figure so if you needed to, something like 10-15% would be adequate at ISO1250.

[Gerald Kelberg]

Hi Steve, I used Enhance only. Some confusion over what to call it - it is called Enhance but you have a Define button in the panel!

[Steve Kaluski]

Some confusion over what to call it - it is called Enhance but you have a Define button in the panel!

I think you'll find Gerald it is 'Denoise' in the panel, but Enhance is its generic name. If you were to apply any DN to the image, purely because of atmospherics in this location, I think this is best suited with Topaz DN AI. You would probably only need 2 set at Standard amount, not AUTO and zero sharpening.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Very nice image, the walrus looks really well defined. My only very slight reservation is that he appears to be a little central, I'd be tempted to move him over a little to the left.

[Gabriela Plesea]

Dear Gerald,

Wow, I would be super happy to have this in my folders Techs look great, wonderful pose, love the environment and reflection.

I can live with the horizon line behind the subject's head but would like to see the Walrus and its reflection stand out, would greatly benefit the image. So many textures to be revealed, those folds and pink pigmentation spots on the subject, let us not forget the battle scars!

So I agree with Steve and Jon, truly a wonderful capture just needs a tad more 'oomph', maybe some saturation and a curve adjustment?

Cannot wait to see more

Kind regards,

[Andreas Liedmann]

hey Gerald ... a solid image of this species , nicely captured imho.
always tricky to find the color balance in scenes like this one .
think you did quite well .
the glacier is giving the image a cool depth .

tfs Andreas