I photographed this doe and her triplet fawns a couple days ago. I was making my way to Winnipeg and pulled off the main highway at West Hawk Lake to get some fuel and hop on the scenic route through Whiteshell. I spotted this quartet just after the turnoff from the main highway in what looked like an old gravel pit.
I really like the interaction of the deer (although it would have been nice if the fawns looked a little more relaxed), but recognize there are a some issues. Unfortunately, I had a few things against me that I couldn't do much about. The deer were making thier way down a gentle slope sticking to the lowest parts of the terrain and there was just no way to get down eye level with them - this shot is taken from across the hillside looking down into a "bowl" and it has left a very noisy foreground and background. It was an overcast, drizzly day and while the flat light works well for some things, the textures of the fur seem to have gotten lost here (and unfortunately, because of the noise in the image (i.e. bigger .jpg file) and the file size limitation on the site, in order to present a full size image I have had to knock the quality way down, which hasn't helped the problem...)
To my eye the colour balance / white balance seems a bit strange (I ended up white balancing based on some of the sampled fur) - but shifting in either direction doesn't seem to help much. Any thoughts on this?
Jeff,
Nice interaction. You have got all the four in nice pose without one of them appearing incoherent. the Any noise reduction done? A little more depth of field to cover the deer on the right would have been great. However, not knowing the distance, I am not sure if narrowing the aperture by nearly 2/3rd stop if not a full stop would have helped. I guess this scene appears warmer than actual? I find the eyedropper tool as a good starting point for finetuning the colour balance in lightroom.
Though the overall luminance looks good, please give this a try.
I would suggest making a selection of the highlights (see second link below) using the channels palette and CRTL-Click on the RGB channel. Back at layers palette on a BG copy, create a mask of the selection. Then change blending mode to multiply (first link below). Adjust opacity to suit. This will help to reduce the highlights while protecting the shadows from getting too dark.
What a great subject ! I really like the mother and 2 fawns with head up. Also interaction by mother. The head down on the 3rd fawn I think slightly takes away from image. Would have preferred head up even if HA not perfect. Did you take more images ?
Robert as always has the answer to POP the picture and I defer to his expertise on this.