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Moo(n) cow
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Back to an old haunt of mine in Cull Bank. I’d finished with the sunset so these unlikely targets played ball.
Alan
Maybe its just me but I prefer it without the moon. It distracts from the cow.
Nice conversion & vignette works well. Best cow shot I’ve seen since your last one from Inisheer.
Very nice, great choice of colour.
It makes me sleepy, very calming photo.
Martin
id go for one without the moon. I want to focus on the cow, and the moon is distracting my eye a bit from settling on the cow. Thats only very minor though, this is a great image. im from an area full of cattle and sheep and they are just normal everyday things to me, so i never considered shooting them. tried once with sheep but my images dont look like anything but a field full of sheep, if you get my drift.
what post processing did you use here?
The original intention was to have the moon as you see it in relation to the cow but the suggestions to remove it do make sense – I’ve tried it.
Re the processing. It went roughly as follows:
In Lightroom
>Desaturated the image
>Added a light brown highlight and shadow tintIn PS
>Duplicated layer
>Sharpened top layer to 500%, radius 0.7 and masked all off but the foreground cow
>Ctrl-click the green channel, applied a colour layer and applied the mask from the Ctrl-click of the green channel to this layer. The colour was dropped from the cows back.
>Added a Contrast/Lightness layer and boosted this to around 80% and lightness to around 30%. Selectively masked background areas.
>Flattened image and duplicated the result.
>Placed an oval selection around the centre of the image with a 200 pixel feather.
>Inverted the selection (Ctrl-Shift-i) and Dropped the lightness to create a vignette.
>Masked off the area around the moon and the top of the sky to take the definition from the oval.
>Flattened & framed>compressed to 850 pixels on the long side in irfanview and 10% sharpen.
Or something along those lines.
ALan.
Very good Alan. A well composed image. I can understand though why
some might think it would work better without the moon, though personally
I prefer it with. The reason it jars a little at the moment is that, like your
single bovine subject, it has relatively sharp edges, but shouldn’t. Create a haze
consistent with the distant blurring and it might sit just a little better.
Lovely toning by the way…Rob.
Fair comment Rob – I hadn’t considered the harshness of the moon.
Thanks for commenting.
Alan.
I really like this picture, the texture and tone in the grass is just fantastic and the expression of the cow is really engaging, nice position in the frame as well.
Agree 100% with Rob though about the moon, think some softness would be much better with this scene.Sinead.
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