Walking on the Wild Side

[Didache]

Hi all - a couple of wildlife shots I did recently. As always, comments are welcome.

Cheers
Mike

[Don Schaeffer]

Wow these are great, so sharp.

[readingr]

These are excellent, my only critique is that I wish you hadn't cropped the fox's bottom off.

Roger

[Seb]

Hi all - a couple of wildlife shots I did recently. As always, comments are welcome.

Cheers
Mike

Mike, I love the frog picture. The colors complement each others so well and the textures are quite fantastic.

I am not sure about your fox. I like the angle but the colors seems off (or perhaps its just me, I am no wildlife expert).

Seb

[Didache]

Thanks guys. You more or less confirmed what I thought about the fox. Of all the fox pics I took this one has easily the best expression/angle of head/etc. But, like you, I wasn't entirely happy with the pose. Also, although you probably can't see it, on a 10x8 the quality of the fur deteriorates quite badly on the rump (due to the very small depth of field I had).

How about this? I've just cropped it all out except for the best bit!

Cheers
Mike

[readingr]

Mike

Wow love the composition and the crop which is much better than the original but as you said you could do with a bit more DOF. Where were these taken?

What camera, lens ...

Can we go there for the UK field trip?

Roger

[Didache]

Hi Roger .. they were taken this morning (Friday) at the British Wildlife Centre, which is around 6 miles or so south of Junction 6 of the M25 heading into Sussex. It's a recommendable place - they have a website which is easy to find with google). Basically they keep only British native species, including otters, red/roe/fallow deer, badgers, red squirrels, foxes, etc, mostly in breeding groups and in parkland settings. Every half an hour there is a talk on one of the species and the keeper appears with food, which makes the animals come out nicely for photographs. I would certainly have no problem with going there as a field trip although I think one or two would prefer Kent. Let's keep it as a possible.

The camera was a Pentax *ist DL with a 80-320mm lens (multiplied up by 1.5 because of the digital). I guess the fox was taken at around 250mm. The reason for the small DOF was simply because I had the camera set on 1/1000 to minimise shake at the longer focal lengths.

Cheers
Mike

[julsoph]

I love the shot of the fox. The expression on his face is absolutely wonderful...I actually said "aw!"... For ME, sometimes catching a great expression makes the rest of the technical stuff way less important...for the individual shot. That's how I think about this one.

I love the frog too, but the fox is just great.

Emily

Oh, and I really prefer the cropped version.

[Coastal Flyer]

Cropped version of the fox is much better. I really like the head angle. The frog is perfect with great detail.

Little help though: how do you post such large images? My 640x640 are half that size. Maybe.

Thanks,

CF

[Didache]

I don't know how I get large images. They are all 640 max, 72 dpi and around 120kb. It's just the way they turn out.

Mike