Alan Kiecker, QPSA
About the Image(s)
A couple weeks ago I upgraded my Nikon D810 to a mirrorless Z7ii. The Minnesota Zoo is just a couple miles away from our home and makes a most excellent location for practicing with a new camera. Since both my wife and I have new cameras (she has OM-1) it was off to the zoo we go. Moving from DSLR to mirrorless is quite a learning experience. The D810 may have a menu system but I hardly ever used it, but the Z7ii is just the opposite. Learning the menu system and configuring the user controls is taking some time.
Nikon Z7ii, Nikon 28-300mm lens at 250mm, 1/200 sec @ f/5.6, ISO 64.
Most of the post processing on this image was done in Lightroom Classic, but I did go to Photoshop to select the subject, refine the selection as necessary, create a mask and darken the background. This was done to make the subject itself stand out more from the background.
This round’s discussion is now closed!
7 comments posted
1) sometimes when I darken a background, I add just a little field blur and slightly reduce saturation to "pop" my subject a little more.
2) LR Classic 2022 allows you to select and invert the subject from within the app - no need to go to Photoshop.   Posted: 05/10/2022 15:40:34
Anyway, I like how you handled this image, I didn't realize you'd manually blurred the background, I just figured it was a shallow DOF, so nice job handling that. It's well exposed too. One minor thing, which may not be worth hassle to make look realistic, but my eye keeps jumping to the big leaf on the bottom right.
  Posted: 05/10/2022 20:48:41
Anyway, I like how you handled this image, I didn't realize you'd manually blurred the background, I just figured it was a shallow DOF, so nice job handling that. It's well exposed too. One minor thing, which may not be worth hassle to make look realistic, but my eye keeps jumping to the big leaf on the bottom right.
  Posted: 05/10/2022 20:48:42
I haven't made the jump to mirrorless, so it was interesting to get your take on these new cameras.
This is a nice portrait of the prairie dog! You caught him/her in a interesting pose. My only suggestions would be to go back to PS and darken the area around the subject a little more. The piece of bark or dirt on the lower right might be cloned out. You might consider putting a vignette on the image as well.   Posted: 05/13/2022 10:20:09