Day at the Zoo

[tmbroe01]

Haven't posted here in a while. Was at the zoo the other day and thought I'd share some shots. Any comments welcome.

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I know this one's I little dark, but I liked something about it.

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Thanks for looking!

 

[LaFoto]

Nice. The water looks cook in the second! Very sharp, too.
Next time you go to the zoo, you might either no longer want to compose photos as centred as these are any longer, or your might want to "apply the scissors" to these so they are less centred after your "creative cropping" process? Since you've "cut into" the animal bodies, anyway, getting their eyes into the very middle of almost every photo here, leaving large amounts of background space all around them, you have material aplenty to try out the most pleasing crops.

 

[tmbroe01]

Here are some of the photos reworked along with an extra one. Any opinions/advice welcome.

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[Antarctican]

I like your shots of the Victoria Crowned Crane (at least I think that's the right name) as you got good detail of the feathers. The monkey shot is good too, but the fact the end of its tail is cut off is distracting to my eye. Lafoto's suggestions are good ones. Even though you've reworked several of the shots, they're still fairly 'centred'.

 

[tmbroe01]

Thanks for the comments. I know the composition of most of these isn't very exciting, which is something I need to work on.

I, too, was very disappointed that I cut off the monkey's tail.

I got another decent shot of him showing his whole tail that I'll throw up after I work with it.

 

[tmbroe01]

Here's another photo of the monkey. It's my attempt at "saving" the original shot. I'm very interested to know others opinions as to whether they think it is "overdone".

Here's the original for comparison. As you can see it needed a lot of help.

 

[kundalini]

Hope you don't mind too much Tim, but I'm guessing this is more of what LaFoto and Anty had in mind with regard to the cropping. As said, since you already "cut" into the body of the animal, might as well take the best of the situation. This may be a bit severe to your liking, but it gives an example of moving the eyes off center. Since the animal is looking to the right, it makes sense, compositionally, to have some space in that direction, i.e. room to look, move, etc. It helps give a more natural fluidity to movement and space.

Here's my thoughts.

Just a quick thought. I also just gave a quick punch to curves/levels/saturation and tweaked sharpness. I don't know much, but I can do these things. Sorta. In my haste, it appears I took some detail out of the white portion of it's face.

If you want it removed, let me know. No worries.

 

[tmbroe01]

@Kundalini: I don't mind at all. I agree with you that your crop gives the shot a much more pleasant composition. I just didn't want to go overboard with my cropping, though, because I didn't want to sacrifice image quality/sharpness. What I need to do next time is compose my shot better initially(for example: something resembling your crop) and then I won't have to rely on extreme cropping to improve the image. As far as these images go my personal preference is to refrain from cropping any closer to fix the rather lame composition in order to preserve image sharpness (which I was very happy with in these photos).