Stayin' on the Trail

Gallery: WildlifePosted October 31, 201470 views2 comments

Our nature area has rules about staying on the trails. This buck has stayed on the trail since I first saw it coming my way. Good boy. Very soon after this shot, he veered to his left and went into a place where I couldn't see him very well. Shortly, another buck arrived on the scene and #1 moved to the side and made no confrontation with #2. Clearly the new buck was a more dominant male. This new buck was the same one I'd seen earlier and was the subject of my previous 2 posts. I think today's buck (#1) has a prettier rack than the first one(#2)I posted but my buck from the previous post was clearly the dominant one. I almost didn't post this as I've some issues with the lighting I couldn't seem to correct but thought that this made for a nice little story. Also, a heavy crop resulted in a loss of sharpness. Comments and recommendations on how to improve this would be appreciated.

Tech Info

Canon EOS 60D with 70-200mm f/4 at 200mm
1/2000th at f/4 and ISO 1600
tripod
Lightroom 5

Comments

2 comments

Comment posted by Catherine Reilly on November 1, 2014 at 7:39 AM

I like the look of 'encounter' in this image. It has a nice, natural woodsy appeal, too, so I don't find the lighting bothersome. Perhaps burn in the lighter colored grass on the left of the buck? For sharpness, you don't mention your processing arsenal, but in Ps a selective sharpening of the deer might work. Or in NIK Viveza, I like the stucture tool that can be applied locally as well. That would preserve the shallow depth of field you have. The eyes-- a little lightening and inc. saturation there? I'm sure others will offer suggestions, too, and this isn't bad as is, IMHO.

Registered on August 16, 2006, 603 Posts, 9192 Comments

Comment posted by Brad Hill on November 3, 2014 at 8:38 AM

HI Peter,

Interesting story...and I do like the purposeful stare and stride of the buck. As you mentioned, lighting was challenging...and I do find the grey OOF "stuff" (rock? branches?) in the foreground distracting.

Cropping doesn't inherently reduce sharpness of an image, unless you crop so much that you go beyond 1:1. In other words, you crop the image so much that - in the case of the NPN standard of 720 pixels on long axis - you have less than 720 pixels to work with and then ask your image editing program to return the image to 720 pixels (which can be done in one step in some programs) - or interpolate it. This will reduce the sharpness of the image. But a tack-sharp original should allow cropping right down to 1:1 (720 pixels in this case) and still be sharp.

Cheers...

Brad

Registered on May 29, 2007, 431 Posts, 6061 Comments