Our town is full of deer and I have several pictures of them in town but this said in their natural environment and although the deer walk around like they own the place I didnt think it would do well with "the voter" so I took a drive out of town and the hills were covered in deer too. This was the closest shot I had on the highest zoom. Also had several really good shots of ducks but they didnt really scream wildlife since I was feeding them :p
Had to do a little work to this
Adjusted levels, saturation, contrast and brightness. Applied USM, sharpen, blur, Gaussian Blur and Selective gaussian blur as well as a cartoon mask. Burned the mountains just a bit and fixed the horizon of the mtns where it ended up with a funny shadow. Croped and saved :)
After Challenge Notes: This was the closest I could get to the deer and of course they were on the wrong side of the road which put their body in shadow. As to the horizon its not really crooked, if you follow the bottom line of the mountains you might be able to tell, the deer are on a hilside, the road is headed down hill and the mountains happen to be going down that way also, all that said, it does look better rotated a little, as the Doc said, it makes me feel a little like im on a ship with it like this. As to the fence I wanted to clone it out but havent advanced as far as cloning yet so needles to say it stayed. Thanks all for the great comments :D
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Although i mentioned the wire, it was not a criticism of what i considered to be a great photo of wildlife where its supposed to be. we dont always see lots of detail on animals because we cant get close enough.I scored a 9 ,should have been 10 but im jealous that you live in that beautiful state,anyone who's been there would recognise it.
OK, I'm ignoring the horizon, but I feel like I'm on a ship. ;) Biggest thing here is likely that the subject of the challenge, the wildlife, is much darker and less detailed than the rest of the picture. (But I'm sure you knew that). The fence doesn't help, but I don't think it's a huge distraction. Had you a powerful fill flash, I think you could have come up with a nice picture.
Unfortunately, for me at least, the background takes over and the deer become insignificant. That would be fine for a landscape shot but it really doesn't show the wildlife to the full potential - especially with barbed wire cutting through the necks.
6 - Very good potential. Nice scene. Criticism; likely not (and apologies in advance if wrong), but this does look slightly 'crooked' - the barbed wire fencing 'adds' to that too, so don't know. Depending what you had to work with I think that a crop variation (especially at the fore) to try to give the deer more dominance and 'pop' (obvious potential contrast issues here in pp), make this even better in my opinion.
I would have cloned out the fence (Don't know if that would be against the rules or not) and brought out a little more detail in the shadows. The sky: It could be my monitor, but I see a lot of banding. Didn't count it against you though.
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