Look For a Contender

After a weekend of meetings and trying to get stuck into processing a lot of images from a recent hotel shoot I have an interesting week ahead.  In between a lot of small projects that need some attention I will be making time to shoot a few specific images I need for upcoming workshops.  Looking forward to heading out on my own to shoot what I want, how I want to.  It is a luxury that I don’t always have so hoping for some good photo time!

During the weekend I was going through and organizing some of the images from last week and one particular image caught my attention.

This is the straight from camera RAW image I shot as we were watching a group of 12 Wild Dogs finishing up a young impala they killed about 10 minutes earlier.  The sun had just dropped below the horizon as the dogs were running all over the place, each one trying to keep a piece of the kill to themselves.  I locked onto and was trying to keep up with one individual as he took off with a piece of the carcass.  In the low light conditions I was already shooting at 1/125, with a 200mm f.2.8 lens, and ISO 1600 and tracking the Wild Dog in the viewfinder was quite a challenging task.  I was also shooting on Auto White Balance as the light during the last 30 minutes of the day changes all the time and instead of worrying about it decided to go Auto and change it later if necessary (as I was shooting in RAW) .  There were quite a few blurred images in between but this one felt like it had potential.  To me there was something about the dog running into the open clearing.  So here goes with the basic though pattern as I quickly processed the image.

When I opened the image in Lightroom I knew there was something in this image that could work but also had a few concerns.

First off the subject was slap bang in the middle of the frame, which was the result of me trying to keep up with the moving Wild Dog, and then there was also a few distracting elements.  The one dog who snuck into the bottom of the frame is the obvious one but then there was also the large piece of dead wood on the right of the frame.  In an image our gaze gets pulled to areas that stand out, whether light or dark, and to me this piece of wood was almost more of a focus then the dog I was trying to keep up with.  Difficult o keep track of all these things as you try and keep a fast moving subject in the viewfinder.

So, the first step was to crop to get it closer to what I originally ‘saw’ in the image.

Even after the crop there was still one area of the image that I was not sure about – the little piece of shrub in the top left corner.  On the one hand I actually quite liked it as it made you gaze jump between the dog and the top corner to where he was moving but in the end I decided to clone it out as well in order to keep the focus 100% on the running Wild Dog.  Still have mixed feelings as to whether I should have kept the shrubs but anyway – moving on.

From here I took the cropped image from Lightroom and made a few adjustments using a few Nik filter (which plugs very easily into either Lightroom or Photoshop).  These adjustments included:

• Contrast – Using Viveza I made a few small local adjustments to the Wild Dog which included upping contrast and saturation to make the subject stand out form the grass.
• Vignette – The second step was to add a vignette around the image in order to make the background, the entire area around the Wild Dog, to bring the brightness down and also pull the viewers eye even more towards the subject.
• Saturation – The last step was to up the saturation and warmth of the entire image just a little to get the image closer to that soft, golden late afternoon light.
  

Now once all the above adjustments were finished I sharpened the image every so slightly using a high pass filter which brought me to the final image.

Nice, but quite different from the first image.  Do you think that the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of the image has been compromised?  Does it not still show the essence of the original scene?

To me this image captures perfectly the scene we saw just after sunset a week ago and not just in my minds’s eye.  This is the shot I ‘saw’ as I was snapping away at the running dog, the image I wanted show as the final product.  I am very clear and open about the fact that I cropped and removed a few distracting parts out of the image.  With regards to the various color and contrast adjustments, this is a natural part of digital photography and something I believe you have to do and yes, the goal is to keep your wildlife images natural and at all times be honest about what you do to them during post processing.

I would much rather do some post processing work on an image and come up with a usable, yet realistic, wildlife image than end up with a shot that looks (sounds) like Marlo Brando’s character Terry in the 1954 movie On The Waterfront – “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.”

Possible lessons from this post?

• Never delete images while you are out in the field as there could be a ‘contender’ in there somewhere.
• Look for images inside your images that might have something to offer.  Something that catch your eye.
• Don’t be afraid to crop, process and work on an image to create a ‘contender’.
• Be honest about what you do to your images during post processing!

I know there are many people out there who do not believe in ‘photoshopping’ their wildlife images.  Personally I think it is imperative to touch up contrast and saturation and perhaps crop should you have not been able to get it perfect in camera.  Not going to digress into this never ending discussion so will end off with a quote I recently saw on Scott Kelby’s website – “The photographers who don’t like HDR are the ones who don’t know how to do HDR—just like people who complain about the use of Photoshop in photography—those are people who aren’t very good at Photoshop. You don’t hear HDR experts complaining about HDR, just like you don’t hear Photoshop experts saying “There’s too much Photoshop!”

When you next look through your latest wildlife images, don’t forget to look for images that you initially overlooked but that could possibly work.  Look for a contender.

Gerry