Ram + pre-process zoom

Simply an incredible portrait!!! Great detail capture. Very nice Lon!

Ken Archer

Great shot Lon - I love everything about it!

Awesome portrait! The detail on the horns is oustanding! Thanks for sharing.

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing your skills and vision with us.

The side lighting works very well here and really brings out texture in the rams horn. Love the lit eye too. Beautiful portrait.

Lovely portrait image Lon, the side lighting is really cool here, the lit eye almost seems like it's glowing from within.

Hi Lon,

There's definitely some interesting lines and textures here - lots to look at. And a lot of power/drama.

I'm not certain about the crop - altho' the light produces a strong asymmetry in the image (e.g., the two horns look very different owing to the light) which would lend itself to an off-centre composition, my visual system still reassembles the bits into a nearly symmetrical animal - which might work better for me as a centred composition. The inky black background adds to the drama of the lighting on the ram, but if looked at from a perspective of "realism", it's hard to imagine a situation where that dark of a background would occur with so much light on the ram. But cast realism aside and there's a lot of power and drama in this image - it's quite compelling.

Cheers...thanks for sharing this...

Brad

PS: Probably just a glitch with the server switchover, but I'm not able to see the larger version...

Love the lighting and the black background. Like how you also have detail in the shadow areas.

For purposes of comparison, here is a detail crop showing a segment of the image before any post processing, just as it came out of my camera. You can see that there were some areas of light and color coming through the background, this one over the head and a slightly bigger zone under his left horn. The selective levels/curves adjustment did a decent job of turning all of that dark. The other zone for selective curves was to brighten the shadows on the ram, just a touch. In terms of symmetry, the center point of the full frame is almost center of the bridge of his nose. So the crop I posted took a sliver off the left and a corresponding sliver off the bottom. (Brad, I hope you can see large version now; it shows up fine from this end!)

Great shot, Lon! Custer State Park is one of my favorite places. The detail and clarity with the drama make the picture for me. Thanks for sharing.
Jack

What a wonderfully dynamic image, Lon!
I especially like the way the chin whiskers set against the horn shadow elongates and gives depth to the face.
Well Done!
Neil

You did a great job Lon. The sidelighting shows nice detail in the horn and I like the light on the eye as well, while still retaining good detail in the shaded areas. DOF looks fine as well. The dark background helps in the creation of a dramatic portrait.

Beautiful Lon! The dramatic lighting combined with the great detail and good exposure control make for a striking and unique portrait. I understand why you darkened the lighter colored spots in the BG. They would other wise have distracted and prevented an artistic looking image the way it is now. I do understand Brad's suggestion about the centered comp. I feel a perfect center placement would work very well here, but I would have to see it to be 100% sure.

Another lovely image from you, Lon!