Alligator

Absolutely superb. Simple beauty.

Super, I live here and I have not get a chance to photograph a gator like this image. Nice light.

Good size and position in the frame. Would benefit imo from some local contrast enhancement to remove the digital haze - I would apply another round of usm at 25:30:0. I would probably also select the head shape using the magnetic lasso and slightly increase the luminance values by pulling up in curves at the mid-point.

Nice work.

Dennis, hope you enjoyed some warm weather. I like the reflection, well done.

magical...

Cheers,

This is wonderful, Dennis. Love the dark and darker - outstanding image ( actually the best I have ever seen of an alligator!)

Excellent. It looks serious

Dennis,

Great capture, the detail is superb, very good mood in the lighting too.

Stu

Gorgeous, mean, dark, moody and menacing Dennis!!

Absolutely stunning - don't change a thing!

Very cool shot Dennis. The dark water enhances the threatening nature of the gator.

omionous to see. Great mood shot. I like the feeling, "Don't mess with me"

Hey! My wife didn't sign her model release!

Denis, this is great. I'll be in Florida in a few weeks and I want this shot! But it strikes me as a particularly difficult situation to determine the proper exposure. Can you explain how you arrived at your settings.

Russ
Thanks for the kind words (and everyone else above). I watch the histogram on the back of my D1x on virtually every shot. The idea is to capture the entire range of pixels, and then not to have to change that very much. I wanted the picture moody and dark. I made a guess of an exposure to start with and took a test shot. Then I set the final exposure so that the vast majority of the histogram was shifted to the left for the dark colors. The histogram did not run off either end but was biased to the left. I converted, sharpened and put a frame on it.. thats it..

Thanks again and good luck

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With film, spot meter the water which is essentially dark green or black and close down 1.5 stops and this should be pretty close. The situation did not lend itself to incident meter reading as I was on a road and the gator was down under some trees. Nikon RGB on F5 probably would have gotten this right on matrix, straight with no comp.

A classic gator shot - love the diagonal comp.

Dennis, great job! The dark exposure gives this guy a menacing, sinister look.

Dennis, this image rocks on so many levels. A bit of postproduction tweaking would further enhance this outstanding image.

Best,

Chas

Stupendously menacing.