I am fascinated by HDR and its applications. I know it's not suitable for every shot and not for every photographer's fancy, but I just HAVE to try...how will you know if it's something that can be applied to a specific shot without trying it?
I created this image recently in the Kruger National Park. This large lone elephant bull was giving me his undivided attention, and the sky was building up some torrential weather (it never actually rained but it threatened for a while). The scene just screamed 'THIS IS AFRICA' to me, so instead of zooming in on the elephant I went to 100mm and captured the scene. Obviously it would be near-impossible to capture real-time bracketed exposures with a moving animal, so I used the RAW file to generate 3 exposures and proceeded from there to create 2 different HDR images with Photomatix, one using the 'Details Enhancer' algorithm and another using the 'Tone Compressor' algorithm.
These I then proceeded to blend using layer masks in Photoshop and applied a few of my BPN-learned tricks like 'Local Contrast Enhancement', 'Reverse S-curve' etc. I also applied a technique that is supposed to simulate the colours achieved by using Velvia film in the old days. I wish the tree wasn't directly behind the ellie.
The out-of-camera picture was rather bland. Again, I know it won't be everyone's forte, but please humour me and give me your honest opinions! I quite like this. In fact, I can see it hanging against my living room wall pretty soon...:)
(Due to the amount of detail contained in this, the best quality setting I could save to, even at 800px wide, was 62)
Hi Morkel,
I like it. But you probably knew I would by looking at most of my posts :). I might smooth out the grasses and bushes a bit as they're a bit spikey for my tastes (could be the detail you referenced). I might also take a bit of the yellow/red out of the tusks but I haven't seen too many elephants lately so I could be wrong on that too. I don't mind the tree coming out of the head as it kind of forms an arch over/around the subject. I say "print it and hang it".
Understand your interest Morkel and appreciate you sharing. Don't dislike this at all and feel as Steve says, with some TLC they'll be a place for this on a wall. WD!
Morkel I really like the composition and the elephant action you captured in this image. The surroundings and gorgeous sky really add to the beauty of this capture. I agree that it could be a tad oversharpened as the grasses are a little spiky in places. Otherwise a very lovely image thanks for sharing.
I worked on the points suggested - toned down blues in the sky, toned down yellows on teeth some more (although they get yellow teeth from tree root saps etc), and did a few passes of some low-level noise reduction on all the bushes to make them softer. Also added slight Gaussian blur to the FG strip.
Really nice Morkel. I like the more intense colors of the OP vs. the re-post (but then everyone is different in that regard). Shame the tree behind the ele detracts a bit from the impact of the image though.
Morkel, I like the repost, just right. Though the tree behind the head is not a show-stopper, if that kind of thing is avoidable, best to try too. However, I know how these things go and that moving around many times is not an option.
the tree was a shame, but the elephant wasn't exactly standing still and moving straight ahead on the road to get the tree out from behind him wouldn't have given me a head-on view of the animal :(
I have just come back from South Africa and Botswana and the scene is just as I remember. I have so many photos like your original and I did not know what to do with them to make them special. Thanks for the idea of using HDR, it might be well worth a try. This section is a great place to come to critiques and ideas - a great thanks to all who had the idea to set it up and to all those that post images and critiques
Hey Morkel,
I admire your thoughts to try different approaches and I am by no means saying mine is correct.....I did want to see what I could come up with on the origiginal OOC shot.....the re-post shows it. I did a multiplied layer on the sky(50% opacity)......rest was about 12 slective layers ranging from the reverse s-curve to color balance to adding black in selective color and a final LCE. Shows that there is more than one way to get there!!! Let me know what you think!
Oh...BTW....love the storm clouds and am OK with the tree...prefer w/o it......but very strong compositionally nevertheless!
I like your second image much better. Romans is good also. My attempts at HDR have been complete failures---yours looks great. I do not mind the tree and the Elephant is fantastic.
@ Roman - thanks for taking time to work on it, I really like your post! I think you got the sky to look similar to mine and got less stark detail in the bushes. I think the ideal shot would be your bushes with my elephant :)
this will force me to play a bit with this shot...
please just give me a quick rundown on how to apply a multiply mask?
Hey Morkel,
Here's a link to a thread a while back....that had a few ways to do corrections on a sky; http://www.birdphotographers.net/for...ad.php?t=14994
read through everyones responses....it was quite interesting and my method is in one of my responses.
Let me know if that helps.
Hey Mork, good day at the office here. I like your OP, but the repost shouts well done too. I like the overall scene. Was this a normal three exposure with a minus,-0, and a + ? I must try one of these.
Elephantscape (HDR)
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