Winter Montana Bison

[risingwolf]

Not your normal Bison picture. They use their large neck muscles to swing their heads back and forth to clear snow away from the plants below the snow. Constantly eating and moving trying to survive the winter. There were 40 bulls in the area but this one was just off the road.

Used my new 70-200 mm L f4.6 lens. ASA 200 1/200s, f5.6 118mm. Just cropped some fence off the right side otherwise full frame.

[Peter Ryan]

Magnificent creature Dave. How lucky you are to be able to get so close in the wild. I do enjoy your posts they all bring back great memories of my visit to Montana and surrounds.

I know they say ‘fill the frame’ and I used to crop too tight in camera. Personally I would like to see a little more room around all sides to give a bit of balance to the mass of the Bison. I am really trying to work on mass and proportion in my images to achieve balance.

Looking more closely I can see the eye and I wonder if a little bit of fill light (shadow/highlight) adjustment to open up the darker face and possibly even a little dodging on the eye (not too much to make it milky) would enhance the small catch light so we can look into the sole of this beautiful animal.

[Shadowman]

Magnificent creature Dave. How lucky you are to be able to get so close in the wild. I do enjoy your posts they all bring back great memories of my visit to Montana and surrounds.

I know they say ‘fill the frame’ and I used to crop too tight in camera. Personally I would like to see a little more room around all sides to give a bit of balance to the mass of the Bison. I am really trying to work on mass and proportion in my images to achieve balance.

Looking more closely I can see the eye and I wonder if a little bit of fill light (shadow/highlight) adjustment to open up the darker face and possibly even a little dodging on the eye (not too much to make it milky) would enhance the small catch light so we can look into the sole of this beautiful animal.

I can't speak for Dave's reasoning in filling the frame, but perhaps it's the intrusive fence behind the bison that he wanted to eliminate.

[mythlady]

I'm with Peter. While the scene as framed certainly gives the sense of the massiveness of the bison, I think backing off a little bit might have given more of an idea of the motion of what he was doing, which is not really clear from the picture itself. That said, it's a great close-up shot, and with the few little tweaks that Peter suggests, an even better one.