Flutterby™! : Horses 2006-06-22 19:08:51.034922+00

Horses

2006-06-22 19:08:51.034922+00 by ebradway 2 comments

I took some more pictures of the horses on the Niwot Loop Trail. I'd love to get some more feedback as I might enter one in a juried exhibition. Please look through them and and comment on the one(s) you like the best. Comment here if you like or on Flickr.

And since you seem to have fairly consistent clouds and setup for this, trying one evening with a two-stop graduated neutral density filter (to try to pull out a little ground detail) and/or a little bit of a warming filter (damn that clear high-altitude air). Speaking of high altitude, would a polarizer blow the atmospherics to overly surreal colors?

I like these shots a lot. I like the horses directly in front of the sun, putting the sun a little off-center, like this one and this one).

And it's completely different from the character of the other shots, but the closer shot of the white horse is cool, especially if you've got a RAW shot that you can play games with the gamma with, goosing the gamma up to compress the highlights and bring up the shadows.

With a digital SLR I'd back up a ways and try shooting with a super long lens to get that "big round sun as a compositional element" sort of "African savannah" shot. It'd help if you could get a wildfire west of you to attenuate that sun somewhat (although I see from other shots that you're in the mountain shadow long before sunset).

[Eric's horse picture with gamma changed]

So here's that last shot of the white horse with the contrast increased about 20% and the gamma boosted to 1.5, and then with a little more stretching in the red. Clearly there's not enough color depth in the shadows in that source image to do this, and of course what you see depends on your display and graphics card as much as what I'm doing with the image, but if you stand back and squint a bit I think it brings the horse to a stronger footing against the clouds.