Patrolling roads early morning in Myakka River State Park and this sleepy Bobcat came down out of large tree. A second Bobcat came down afterwords.
Shooting from wrong side of jeep wth Nikon film camera and manual focus F4 Nikon 500 mm lens grabbed this shot.
Beautiful cat and great opportunity Charles! There seems to be a lot of noise, particularly in the BG, so in the repost, I masked the cat and the FG, then applied a gaussian blur to the BG at about 3.5. This seems to have smoothed the noise out a lot. Good job catching this moment!
Thank you, Dan! I was looking at the top image and thinking, "Is this my monitor???" The photo itself is really nice but that BG looked almost pixelated to me.
Also, you've got a hot spot right on the chest of the animal...anyway you could tone that down or clone it out? You sure got a beautiful portrait here!
Thanks for the advice and practical demonstration.
Learning PS slowly on my own as to maximize the quality of an image.
I would like the image to be perfect right out of the camera ,but tough with wildlife.
Chas.
What are you using for film? What was the exposure if you recall - if your like me you are not keeping records. :)
Is this an older image scanned to digital? Are you using digital now?
Curious as that will help me critique.
If this was a contrasty slide film, I understand the problem with the highlights. I never photographed wildlife when I was using film so bracketed my landscape images - harder with wildlife.
If you using digital now, the histogram is your best friend. Dan did a good job on the BG.
I like the pose and alertness of the cat - nice going for a grab shot.
Looking at the pic and trying to remember.
It was film and the background is GRAIN. You do remember that.
I do not think it was Kodachrome 200 ,but was probably a Fuji product pushed one stop.
Switched to digital 2 plus yrs ago, but my old pics haunt me. Especially the areas I will never get back to.
After this post am now looking to try Gaussian blur in the future, if I can figure it out on my own.
Chas.
Hi Charles, I'm sure that you will be able to handle the guassian blur filter. BTW, I attempted to use Noise Ninja (a noise reduction plugin for PS) on your BG and it didn't seem to do the job, which is rare!
I, like you have just recently switched to digital and I have many, many film images that I would like to digitize, and I have scanned a few. My results seem to require a much different workflow in order to achieve an acceptable result IMO:D than my digital captures. I have recently also upgraded film scanners and I hope for much better results from this equipment. Good luck with your attempts!