elephant face

[peter delaney]

My black and white crusade continues...lol Still trying to convert my fellow BPN colleagues to the virtues of this medium.

D3 600mm lens , Arties bean bag, iso 1250 1/600 f8

[Steve Canuel]

Looks like someone's just had a mud bath facial. At first glance, the contrast between the smooth, mud covered portions and the sharper pebbly skin (especially on the upper trunk) looks almost like it was over smoothed by NR though I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Also think it would look nice with the BG sides completely black, leaving only the illuminated trunk, forehead, and eyelashes.

[Hilary Hann]

Hi Peter, now you know that quite a few of us are keen on b&w ......

I like the concept of this composition and the eyelashes but I feel that the detail is missing on the face. Not sure what it is, perhaps the mud (is it mud that is caking the face?) as the skin under the muddy smears looks to have nice detail. One other observation is that it would have been stronger in my view, if you couldn't see the wrinkles of skin on the rhs behind the eye, keeping the darkness to match more the lhs.

Just seen that Steve has made comments of a similar idea.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Peter, I have looked at this several times now and I guess I am going with the flow here. For me, something like this needs bags of detail and sadly this hasn't, now that might be down to the mud clogging parts of detail, the hard shadows or just the nature of the shot, as I doubt if this is down to the conversion & your process, based on previous postings, LOL. I do however feel, some of the detail has an almost moon like quality in its detail, texture and appearance

I guess you set the benchmark a while back with another B/W image so.

TFS
Steve

[Rachel Hollander]

Peter - hate to add on as I am usually a big fan of your b&w conversions. This one just doesn't do it for me, not sure if it is the mud creating too shiny a surface and obscuring the usually great detail of the elephant skin or the high contrast between the dark sides and the trunk. Do like the lashes though.

Looking forward to your next b&w.

TFS,
Rachel

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Peter,
I like your black and white images. In this case, I feel the mud takes away a bit of texture from the elephants's skin that one normally expects to see. Having said that, one can find the texture and folds on the sides of the trunk as the mud forms several layers. It would have been great if you would have either clicked one half of the head (either left or right half), so that the folds radiating outwards like a curve would have looked great. I enjoy watching some out of the ordinary compositions and lines of exploration that you are trying with your images.

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi