Clash of the titans

Been a long while away from the forums with a hectic few months getting married and just getting back from honeymoon. Not been out with my camera much in the UK but took tonnnes of images in America so hope you don't mind some.

This iamge is taken in Yellowstone during the bison rutt. The bull on the right had a small herd that the bull on the left wanted to take over. They spent at least 30 mins rolling in the dirt, scuffing the ground, walking side by side to eye up and judge each others size. Finally they turned and for about 40 seconds fought with dust going everywhere.

The result was that the challenger won and chased off the defender before returing to the herd to check on each females receptiveness for mating.

This is probably my favourite image of the sequence but I am having trouble processing it. I under exposed the shot to make the most of the angled light that was lighting the dust and there hides but my photoshop skills just don't quite do it justice, any help or advice is welcome.



Thanks Ben

Nikon D300 + 80-200 f2.8 (at 200mm)
F4.0, iso 400, 1/2500 sec -1.33

A place which is on my list. Wonderful to see!

A nice image, must have been some sight
Well done.

Geoff.

Hi - did you manage to get it at a lower angle (pov)? I'm thinking its a little too dark on my equipment,, but really like the dust. I had a go with these a couple of years ago and was close with my focus length to get a reasonable shot.

Ian

I don’t think the image has enough data in the darker tones to be able to do very much with the two bison. I have copied the 8-bit file posted to see what I could give you some processing advice as requested.

Firstly, the image posted has an Adobe RGB colour profile, rather than an sRGB profile and this will make it appear rather dull when posted, duller than it appears on your screen.

Although the image posted is only an 8-bit file, I don’t think that the original capture will have enough data in the darker tones to be able to do very much with the two bison. What I have done with the image is as follows:

I applied a standard shadows/highlight adjustment on a separate layer using:
Shadows Parameters: Amt = 20%; Tonal Width = 20%; Radius = 50
Highlight Parameters: Amt = 30%; Tonal Width = 20%; Radius = 25

I use this as my default Shadows/Highlight adjustment but you have to be a bit vigilant as sometimes you get a 25px highlight halo. If this happens I reduce the highlight radius to 0.

I then made a rather aggressive curves adjustment targeting the darker tones on the sides of the bison (something like +30pts) but I pegged the ¾-tone to avoid change to the brighter tonal values.

This caused the dead logs in the background to go a rather funky blue colour so I opened a hue/saturation adjustment layer and reduced the saturation of the blue and cyan channels to -100% which has returned these areas to a +/- neutral grey.

I then opened a vibrance adjustment layer and increased the vibrance and saturation to taste, something like +30-40 vibrance and +5-10 saturation.

I then flattened the jpg and applied a little sharpening – 2 or 3 rounds of usm: amt = 100; radius = 0.2; threshold = 0.

Finally, I saved the file in the sRGB colour space for web presentation.

Hope this helps.

Thanks all and cheers phil for having a go with reprocessing although it's not quite what I was going for. I was not worried about detail in the buffalo just a catch light on the hides to help show what it is. What I wanted was an atmospheric shot of the lit dust spiraling around the rutting buffalo and very little detail in the background. Although I must say you obviously have some Photoshop skill as you have rescued It alot. Thankyou.