Critique request

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I would like to request a critique of the following image. I thought I checked a lot of boxes off on uniqueness, technical aspects and appropriate processing but it does not seem to be well received. Location is a roadside ditch that I tried to make more euphoric. Looking for feedback on subject, processing, execution, creativeness and anything else you can think of that would evoke some kind of emotional response from the viewer.

thanks!
Mitch


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Hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of taking a screen shot and editing it on FastStone: darkened shadows, brightened highlights, increased saturation and contrast and darkened the left side then cropped it a bit tighter. I'm sure others would do it differently, but I've always liked backlit subjects and portraits of wildlife.

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Hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of taking a screen shot and editing it on FastStone: darkened shadows, brightened highlights, increased saturation and contrast and darkened the left side then cropped it a bit tighter. I'm sure others would do it differently, but I've always liked backlit subjects and portraits of wildlife.

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Thanks Woody. I must admit when I saw the fog my thought was to go high key but I like this version as well. I see a brown gradient as well. Did you add one?
 
I see a brown gradient as well. Did you add one?

I see what you mean. No, I didn't do anything with the colors; the brown cast was probably due to the increase in saturation which I may have overdone a bit. It was a quick edit, certainly a more careful edit or one with different software would yield different, and probably much better, results.
 
I hope you don't mind that I copied your original image and did my take on it. I reduced the exposure on the entire image, then selected the subject and brought the exposure back up on him, plus adjusted the shadows/highlights slightly. Not sure if it works for you or not, just a different perspective.

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thanks everyone for the feedback!
I played around with it some but didn't really come up with anything better than what has been posted already. Only edits I made were to clone out the road or driveway or whatever that is in the background by its head and darken the background just a little to make the animal stand out more. But those were "my" edits and your style may be very much different than mine. The ultimate question really is do you like it? That is all that really matters.
 
I played around with it some but didn't really come up with anything better than what has been posted already. Only edits I made were to clone out the road or driveway or whatever that is in the background by its head and darken the background just a little to make the animal stand out more. But those were "my" edits and your style may be very much different than mine. The ultimate question really is do you like it? That is all that really matters.
Thanks Jeff, I think I like what I was trying to do with the image but in my efforts to disguise the road more I think I went too far.
 
Thanks Jeff, I think I like what I was trying to do with the image but in my efforts to disguise the road more I think I went too far.
That is one of the fun things about digital photography, we can play around with an image and if we don't like it we can revert it back to original form and start over. I've had some images that I really wanted to salvage and after many attempts realized it wasn't going to happen.

Jeff
 
Thanks Jeff, I think I like what I was trying to do with the image but in my efforts to disguise the road more I think I went too far.
Ah, a roadless version is what you were after! I did not even notice it because I was concentrated on the overall balance. In the shot below, I used the clone tool with the background to replace the road, then used it with the grass to blend it in some. I just noticed a light streak that I should have blended in, but you get the idea.

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Thanks Jeff, I think I like what I was trying to do with the image but in my efforts to disguise the road more I think I went too far.
I think as far as engaging the viewer is concerned, the head position could be better. As it is here, it looks rather squashed onto the body. If it was a bit more side on so that the backlight silhouettes the whole animal better and there is less of that distracting white highlighted area on the face, that might have helped, but the mood is nice in the fog. Getting sharp focus can be a challenge in fog though, so maybe need to use manual focus and perhaps remove lens hood - thanks Steve! (See Steve's recent video about lens hoods)
 
Greg's edit is very good. I took that and added some colour saturation. The original image is somewhat low in saturation.

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I would liked to see warmer tones more reminiscent of sunset. Could burn some on the animal to give it more contrast. I don’t like the signature, it may be the font I don’t like. I got a signature made from Etsy for $7 that is easy to use in LR, PS, etc. Great capture however!
 
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