This shot is an HDR in which I have strived to maintain a realistic effect. HDR was necessary to maintain detail in the buffalo while keeping the sunrise colors intact. It shows a buffalo resting by a thermal pool with the Yellowstone Park Old Faithful headquarters in the background. F2.8 so no real depth of field -- it was quite dark and this is a tripod shot. More from Yellowstone in Winter here if you wish
C&C welcome
Not a fan of the HDR here. You have a crazy solid green line at the bottom of the treeline against the snow mid frame. Across the roof of the Lodge as well. The branches about the Buff on the left are Pink. Overall to me the background is very distracting and I'd be temped to crop the top 2/3 of the image and do a B/W or sepia conversion and clone out the branches on the left.
By any chance did you have IS on? I find that sometimes with HDR I get crazy colored artifacts like that with IS.
I think you've had a very nice vision for that shot, and it might well be that you are still exploring different execution pathways.
I'd try to shoot the same scene with perhaps a ND filter for the sky and the snowy area. Use maximum DoF possible before diffraction. Get rid of that retaining wall/fence behind the buffalo.
I prefer the first.
The HDR isnt the issue here. You have chosen such a large framing around the buffalo that it becomes a significant part of the subject. And it becomes problematic to me because of the shallow DOF. To me the blurriness is unpleasant and dramatically interferes with the presentation.
Scott
Thanks for the replies. A lot of room for interpretation. I am at the moment tending to prefer animals in the environment, but it's a good point that the environment then needs to be sharp. A hazard given I was shooting at sunrise and these were 5 - 10 second exposures at f2.8 - f8 or f11 for the background risked the buffalo moving. Except for the chromatic aberration which cropped up on the over exposed frame I prefer the lighter version. A learning experience.
