Zebra in South Africa

[Otavio]

Very nice, Mike. I especially like the 1B (crop). Cheers...

[Loose Canon]

Now you're talkin' Mike!

Well done. That's a great image and one I'd have on my wall.

[Manfred M]

Great shots Mike. We were never able to get that close to most animals on our travels, so even with long lenses, we could not get the nice tight crops you were able to get. The shots are really special!

[Bobobird]

The last thing I was expecting from you ie something not broken.

Fine, fine shots.

[Brownbear]

Wow!

Glad to know that you disagree with me, James.

All,

Terry encouraged me to take the time to remove the distracting stuff that I mentioned when I posted Photo 7. I woke up this morning feeling energized and ready to take on that task, so I eliminated those distracting elements and more. It's not so much that the image is worth making those changes; it's that the task is so easy to accomplish and downright enjoyable to do if doing that sort of thing is enjoyable to you. That leads to my next point.

For those of you who have Lightroom 4 and can make use of a far more powerful Cloning tool, I urge you to test drive the Cloning tool in Lightroom 5 or at least review a tutorial about its improved capabilities. If you have Lightroom 5.0, be sure to immediately update to 5.2, as the Cloning tool is even more powerful in that later version. Though I realize that I mentioned this in another thread, it bears worth repeating here.

The revised photo is shown below with the distracting elements removed and with an improved conversion to monochrome. It's fun to move back and forth in the Lytebox between these last two images to see how much stronger the revised image is.


Photo 8