I went back to give this another try, but this time I went much later in the day to tone down the snow. This is the pic I got. A lower angle would have been nicer, but I had to keep an eye on the farmer's dog which was getting angry at me. I wasn't able to comfortably stay too long. I was actually looking for alternate ways to get around that dog! Even though the dog had met me with the farmer before, I guess "Farmer Permission" does not equal "Dog Permission"!
For this pic, I didn't make major adjustments except to add some canvas to the left, darkened the snow a tiny bit, and brought out the red in the buffalo to lighten it a tiny bit. The fur gets even more fuzzy, especially at the hip, but I don't know why.
ISO 400 30 mm 1/200 f5.6 auto exposure mode exposure correction .33 metering mode: partial
I'd love to hear your comments. Due to the dog, I probably won't return until late spring when the new baby is due to be born, but it would be nice to know how to get a better picture.
hi cheryl, i took a stab at your pic here. the hind quarters of the buffalo looked a little dark. i decreased the contrast a bit and that brought out some more detail in the buffalo. after that, i selected the snow with a color control point and decreased the brightness. then i went into color balance and tried to decrease the blue tint in the snow by adding some yellow and cyan. i gave it one round of sharpening, USM and cropped a tad bit off the bottom.
This is a tough image. First the big thing I notice right away is that fence is not your friend. Harold did a nice job lightening up the buffalo but I am not crazy about the snow in his remake, however I am really bad with colors so I will leave that to the folks who are good at it.
My big thing is composition. The buffalo is in the right part of the frame but the pose is not too flattering. That little guy is CUTE so if you catch him looking at you to give your viewer a good look at your subject your image would come out way better here.
thank you all for you comments. I appreciate them!
Al, what steps did you use to get the color balance?
I am hoping that by late spring, the herd will be farther from the fence where they are currently being fed. At this point, they stick so close to the fence that they want to be petted. OK, and I did pet them a bit. :) but just a bit.
For color balancing I look for a neutral area One than supposes to have no color cast Then I take the eye dropper and adjust the channels until I get balanced readings You can get close
There are also commercial programs like iCorrect Lab Pro with will do the same with one click !!! They have PS plug ins !!!
Thought I'd play around a bit and see if I could get this any better....I usually prefer working in Paint Shop Pro X2. Using various color balance methods I could not get anything satisfactory. Finally I duplicated the layer and used "hue and saturation" to reduce saturation until the snow looked better (in my opinion) and then erased the effect from the buffalo and fence wood. Merged the layer, then duplicated again and used fill flash on the buffalo, erasing the effect from the snow and sky. (I may have gone a little overboard on the fill flash.) Thoughts?
buffalo--another try
