Story Was at the Camden Adventure Aquarium. Was 2nd pass thru the room, and as it was in the water and I was shooting it with the 300mm, it got agitated and charged out of the water. I kept shooting and it got bored with me, so it started eating. Some father started putting his kids on the wall and they were throwing straw that fell from the birds nest at him, and he came over and started eating. His wide open mouth was literally within inches of the kids, and definately wasn't safe. After they left, I switched in the 50mm and moved around. Some teenagers started throwin some straw and it stayed there, snorting and opening his mouth, so I lifted the camera up, prayed I got a good angle and clicked away. This was the best shot out of the bunch. Can't believe I got a full frame with the 50mm. BTW, hippos have really bad breath. I'll post the original post voting if anyones interested.
Processing Opened in Photomatrix Pro
Tonemapping
Open in CS3
Crop
levels
curves
slightly adjusted saturation
healing brush for some distracting reflections on wet snout
clone stamped out a distracting straw piece that was hanging from mouth
border
masked border and drew in the snout again to give it the "coming at you look"
USM
resize
USM
resize again
save for web
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Place: 118 out of 556 Avg (all users): 6.1190 Avg (commenters): 7.2727 Avg (participants): 6.1959 Avg (non-participants): 5.8621 Views since voting: 1326 Views during voting: 215 Votes: 126 Comments: 13 Favorites: 2 (view)
Most people harp on my thick frames. It totally works here for me as well and I've yet to figure how to do that one. It's very funny to me but yoikes, he should learn to swallow his food before smiling! Good luck to ya!
Great capture, no doubt. I've never had, the er, pleasure of viewing the inside of a hippo's mouth before. My, what yellow teeth he has! Excellent frame job, too.
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