Zoo Pics .. C&C Welcomed!

[Luv4Photos]

Today, my wife and I took a trip out to the Dallas Zoo. They recently opened up the new Zoo within the last year, and I had never been. So, I thought what the hell!

I hope you enjoy!

1. Grumpy Chimp (she threw rocks and dirt at us!)


2. A giraffe that we were feeding.


3. Gorgeous Blue Macaw


4. Young Male Lion

[jiro]

Every shot has a lot of potential to it. Good job, Shawnda!

[pwnage101]

Very nice photos indeed

I think #2 should have consisted of the giraffe's entire head, but you were probably limited by your lens (even if oriented in landscape).

I like #1 the most, and if you don't mind I'm going to edit it to reveal all of its potential. First I noticed it was a little pale, so I applied a slight tone map to bring out detail in dark areas (esp. the monkey). Then I clipped blacks and added contrast. Then I noticed the white balance was a little off, so I brightened the red channel and darkened the blue channel.

[Donald]

Shawnda

Seeing that the above is your first post into CiC - Welcome. Hope you enjoy what you see and will be part of the group into the future. You've obviously worked out how to post images into messages, but, hopefully, reading the rest of this message will help you get the most out of the site.

If you haven't already done so, please be sure to read Post #1 of this thread HERE. There are links in that post to other helpful advice and guidance. Also our Code of Conduct in the FAQ HERE

CiC is a resource strongly focused towards learning, no matter what your current level of knowledge, skills and experience. As well as these forums, where you can engage in discussion, ask questions and seek comment and criticism on your pictures, CiC has a comprehensive range of tutorials that, by common consent, are amongst the most sensible and straightforward that you can find anywhere. Remember to have a look on the tutorials and techniques pages which you can access from the menu bar.

And finally, the Mod team thought it might be a useful addition to CiC to have in-house access to some selected video tutorials. You can find them in the Community Lounge forum under 'Photography Video Tutorials'.

[tb72]

I have experienced once zoo photography and the 2 main difficculties are background and to find the right and safe position versus light.

My favrite is the #1 and the post processing performed by Troy is good.

The lion picture has also some intesrest and potentially into b&w

[tb72]

Here is a proposal of b&w conversion. If you think that it disturbs your post, feel free to tell me and I will remove my test

[Luv4Photos]

Shawnda

Seeing that the above is your first post into CiC - Welcome. Hope you enjoy what you see and will be part of the group into the future. You've obviously worked out how to post images into messages, but, hopefully, reading the rest of this message will help you get the most out of the site.

If you haven't already done so, please be sure to read Post #1 of this thread HERE. There are links in that post to other helpful advice and guidance. Also our Code of Conduct in the FAQ HERE

CiC is a resource strongly focused towards learning, no matter what your current level of knowledge, skills and experience. As well as these forums, where you can engage in discussion, ask questions and seek comment and criticism on your pictures, CiC has a comprehensive range of tutorials that, by common consent, are amongst the most sensible and straightforward that you can find anywhere. Remember to have a look on the tutorials and techniques pages which you can access from the menu bar.

And finally, the Mod team thought it might be a useful addition to CiC to have in-house access to some selected video tutorials. You can find them in the Community Lounge forum under 'Photography Video Tutorials'.

I will definitely get to those tutorials, Donald. I am still learning a lot about technique and how to tell when something is over exposed, under exposed, too much white balance and etc. I will also watch the videos today to learn more as well.

Thanks again for the awesome information!

Very nice photos indeed

I think #2 should have consisted of the giraffe's entire head, but you were probably limited by your lens (even if oriented in landscape).

I like #1 the most, and if you don't mind I'm going to edit it to reveal all of its potential. First I noticed it was a little pale, so I applied a slight tone map to bring out detail in dark areas (esp. the monkey). Then I clipped blacks and added contrast. Then I noticed the white balance was a little off, so I brightened the red channel and darkened the blue channel.

I have a couple of them with the giraffe's whole head. I'll see what I can come up with and post it. I have a great picture of a little girl feeding the giraffe some lettuce and another one of him biting down on the lettuce. I'll get that up there today sometime. Thanks for the editing, can you tell me what program you used for the editing? I am currently using a mac and have been playing with a trial version of Aperture (hopefully will be buying it soon) for post editing or I'll get Lightroom 3.

Here is a proposal of b&w conversion. If you think that it disturbs your post, feel free to tell me and I will remove my test

Funny that you say that, because I was going to put him into B&W and then thought.. hold on let me see what folks think in color.

Thanks for all the awesome feedback everyone!

** I do not mind folks editing, otherwise I won't learn anything. I just add that if you mess with the colors and etc., that you let me know what you used (program) and etc., so that way I can learn what you're doing to help enhance my photos! **

[Luv4Photos]

What about the blue macaw? Does anyone have any feedback on that one? That is my most favorite one, because of the vibrant colors. I was just curious as to if it spoke to anyone like it does to me?

[jiro]

What about the blue macaw? Does anyone have any feedback on that one? That is my most favorite one, because of the vibrant colors. I was just curious as to if it spoke to anyone like it does to me?

It does. If I may suggest, you can add some sharpening to the macaw to further emphasize him on the image. On the side, the bright area behind him on the right of the frame does seem to detract my attention from the bird. I'd probably ask you to clone it out for a stronger image. Something like this...



1. Extracted the macaw from the frame using photoshop and set it as a new layer.
2. Adjusted the color contrast, saturation, and added some sharpening to this layer.
3. Using the background layer (less the macaw data) I cloned out the 3 bright areas by borrowing pixel data from the left and right side part of the frame using the clone tool set at 3% flow.
4. Combined the 2 new layers back and flattened it together with the original background layer.

[pwnage101]

I have a couple of them with the giraffe's whole head. I'll see what I can come up with and post it. I have a great picture of a little girl feeding the giraffe some lettuce and another one of him biting down on the lettuce. I'll get that up there today sometime. Thanks for the editing, can you tell me what program you used for the editing? I am currently using a mac and have been playing with a trial version of Aperture (hopefully will be buying it soon) for post editing or I'll get Lightroom 3.

I used Photoshop (version independent) but it's also possible with aperture. You'd use the "Highlights & Shadows" panel to apply a tone map (the images will appear to look MORE pale) then use the RGB curves panel to fine tune exposure and contrast in all three channels.

[Luv4Photos]

I used Photoshop (version independent) but it's also possible with aperture. You'd use the "Highlights & Shadows" panel to apply a tone map (the images will appear to look MORE pale) then use the RGB curves panel to fine tune exposure and contrast in all three channels.

Awesome, I will definitely have to play it a bit tonight when I get off work. I installed Snow Leopard on my mac from the 10.5 version of OS-X. This took quite a bit of time, unfortunately. So, I wasn't able to get any more photos edited, but will definitely play with them tonight.

[Klickit]

I took the liberty of having a play with your parrot. The image is a potential beauty, showing the cheeky nature of the bird well. The main problems with it are the bright background and the slightly muted parrot. To remedy this, I made some global changes in ACR to balance the background and foreground as much as possible, then went into PS where I selected the parrot, feathered the selection a little, then used levels on the background to reduce overall brightness. Then inverted the selection and did levels again on the parrot to brighten him a little. Then did some dodge and burn on the black & white face patches (at low levels - around 8%). Then made a new layer and used the high pass filter, which worked well here, as that filter sharpens edges, so didn't affect the background. The result is that the parrot "pops" a lot more and the background has been reduced in intensity.

Hope you like the new parrot.

[tihsgod]

ouch... you chopped off your chimps toes ... maybe you could have framed a little to the right also...

but I love your parrot and couldn't resists a quick edit... similar approach as klickit i see... some dodge and burn and a high pass and then a further small sharpening... I also added a crude catchlight to bring the eye up a bit but my effort on the background is non existent. anyway interesting to see some different edits.... neil

[csherw]

I visit Zoos quite often as there are several all within about an hours drive away. I know how difficult it is to take good images because of the surroundings and all those people (usually other photographers) that always seem to get in the way. We also have the delight of numerous parties of schoolchildren who seem more interested in appearing in your photo than looking at the animals. I think these images are good. If I may comment no 1 - I find the background intrusive because it is brightly lit (top right hand corner) and the angle of the tree trunks looks a bit odd. I would have gone for a very narrow depth of field to blur the background and darkened the highlights. As pwnage1 suggests contrast could be increased but how much is a matter of taste, No 2 I would have cropped everything apart from a small area around the eye as that part is a really great image and I think most people would recognise it was a giraffe. No 3 -I would have cropped most of the bottom part of the image leaving just sufficient to show that the lion is resting on a rock. I would have also cropped the sky (despite being jealous of the beautiful blue sky a sight rarely seen in England). My wildlife photographer colleagues always suggest that the animal should be doing something or at least looking at the camera. Easier said than done.

[Luv4Photos]

I visit Zoos quite often as there are several all within about an hours drive away. I know how difficult it is to take good images because of the surroundings and all those people (usually other photographers) that always seem to get in the way. We also have the delight of numerous parties of schoolchildren who seem more interested in appearing in your photo than looking at the animals. I think these images are good. If I may comment no 1 - I find the background intrusive because it is brightly lit (top right hand corner) and the angle of the tree trunks looks a bit odd. I would have gone for a very narrow depth of field to blur the background and darkened the highlights. As pwnage1 suggests contrast could be increased but how much is a matter of taste, No 2 I would have cropped everything apart from a small area around the eye as that part is a really great image and I think most people would recognise it was a giraffe. No 3 -I would have cropped most of the bottom part of the image leaving just sufficient to show that the lion is resting on a rock. I would have also cropped the sky (despite being jealous of the beautiful blue sky a sight rarely seen in England). My wildlife photographer colleagues always suggest that the animal should be doing something or at least looking at the camera. Easier said than done.

Thanks for all the feedback!

For the first photo - the trees look odd because they were oddly placed there in the zoo. The tree trunk that the chimp is sitting on is actually on the edge of a hill and a lot of the trees were on hills which made them look crooked so to speak.

For the second photo - when I get home from work tonight, I'll crop it and post it to give ya a looksie .

For the third photo - I had thought about cropping it, but hadn't done it in the photo yet. I thought the sky was a bit much too, but there were no clouds in the sky that day what so ever. As for the action, those animals were not moving but doing what they could to enjoy what little warm weather there was. It was 50F degrees out, but the wind chill made it a tad bit colder. There was no action, I waited for like 45 minutes to get them yawning or something - with no such luck.

[MixedHerbs]

Fab zoo photos.

The crop is good. However, forgive me, but the lion looks as though he is wearing hair-gel. Can you make him fluffier?

Peter.

Here is a proposal of b&w conversion. If you think that it disturbs your post, feel free to tell me and I will remove my test