Hippo

Good moment for shot.well done.

Fantastic!

Looks intimidating. Good one!

awesome !

What a cool shot

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The composition in this image is really good however the lack of controled depth of feild to include sharp pocus on the duck for me is an opportunity missed. Had the duck also been very sharp, a strong interplay between the 2 animals would have been better.

Another girl-on-the-beach shot. I think that the elves are toying with us.

--Lannie

Landrum, at least its a good looking girl ;)

Richard: I believe the word you're looking for is "Rubenesque."

Duck focus issues aside, I do very much like the image.

Wait, wait... is it she or he? - the hippo I mean. The amount of facial hair suggests a male. The duck is a male, walking away....what's going on?

I like the symmetry of the image: square, centered hippo. Staring at it thinking of the symmetry then causes me to wonder about cropping the rocks on the left. But doing that would either ruin the symmetry, or leave the duck too close to the right edge. Not that symmetry is a good thing. It’s merely the first thing that jumped out of me with this image, even before my brain realized “hippo”.
I very much like the sharp hippo, with the background being (apparently) ocean with the horizon hidden by fog. A neat interplay between sharpness and the opposite of sharpness that is fog. Love it. Probably somewhat abnormally so, as fog always fills me with a sense of wonder and possibility, ever since reading Niven’s “For a Foggy Night” some thirty years ago.
The duck being out of focus does not bother me. I have to wonder whether bringing the duck into focus would have detracted from the hippo. Perhaps if it were in focus then it would be a “Hippo and Duck” image, completely changing it. As it is, the duck makes me wonder about distractions in life. I would not have thought about that with “Hippo and Duck”.
To be clear, this doesn’t have me thinking in terms of “photo” and focus, exposure, etc. It is an image and it is making me think about broader things than photography.
Back to the rocks: leave them. And accept that the image would have been slightly better if the rocks were out of focus similar to the ducks, or just not there at all. But as I said, if you had cropped them out it would ruin the symmetry or ruin the duck.

By a strange coincidence (and I can't remember exactly why), I was looking at this photograph last week, and now here it is as a POTW.

I love this photograph! Unlike some others, I don't have a problem with the duck being slightly blurry...I think it's motion blur, anyway. The hippo seems contemplative, the duck provides some left to right movement...and the hippo is not distracted or disturbed. This photograph makes me smile. I also really like the black and white. I'll also freely admit to being partial to animal images, especially when they are done well.

Like a lot of other photographs in the photographer's portfolio, this one holds up well for me with repeated viewings. One real test of a photograph for me is whether or not I'd have a print of this framed and hanging on a wall in my house. In this case, the answer is yes.

I like the squrare format & compsition, as well as the sense of scale given by the duck as it nonchalantely walks past. I do think this suffers from DOF problems as evidenced by the foreground and the out of focus duck

Enhorabuena Mikel!!! una magnífica foto digna de alguién con un gusto exquisito, una técnica envidiable y una vista de lince. Me encanta la composición y el color o no color.

The duck (whether in or out of focus), the rocks on the left, and some rocks etc are distractions in this image and should be removed. When I look at the image, my eye wanders to the duck, then the rocks - and then I start wondering why am I looking at those to begin with? And don't spend the time to investigate the hippo - which clearly is the center of attention in the image. There is no interaction between the hippo and the duck - none whatsoever. And the pile of rocks just happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time (as is the duck). If this was my image, I would clean this up to the point were there are no features left except on the hippo.

I seriously considered removing the stone and the duck, but I was planning to submit this photograph to a contest, and they required the presentation of the RAW file untouched. That's the reason.
Thank you for all your comments.

I assume then that the contest does not allow any modifications to the file, such as cloning then?

My own sense is that if you want to get rid of the rocks at the edge of the left side of the frame, you could easily crop them off and reduce the sky to keep your current aspect ratio without losing any information or upsetting the composition or the read of an obliterated distance. In fact, it could even bring the duck and the hippo more into balance with each other. As it is, it is fine but maybe just a bit out of balance overall--negligible to be sure, but still OOB.

There is something very classic about the placement of this hippo in the frame and I think that is why the duck is bothering some. Whether elephants, hippos or rhinos, we have seen this device before and they didn't have ducks in them. In some ways, I think the duck makes this image new except, honestly, I wonder if that is the right kind of bird for this scene. I say that only because I have never seen a Mallard duck proximate to this sort of wildlife, so it is causing me a bit of a disconnect. I am not suggesting that they don't exist together in the wild, I just don't know and haven't seen it before. I am used to seeing Mallards in the local park pond or in wetlands here in the states. So, for me, as someone who can only draw on what I know, the shot doesn't seem authentic in the sense of "in the wild" but more like maybe a wild animal park or something. It's just a matter of the illusion to being more exotic is missing and yet it seems to want to be that.

Technically, I was wondering about the split tone effect here. The blue in the darks seems to be pulling them forward a bit and are a bit muddy to me--especially our right side of the hippo's body. The slight yellow bias in the light tones seems fine. Warm tones add depth (the reason most of us toned our b/w darkroom prints with selenium) and here that is lost a bit. Maybe a bit more darkening of those areas (contrast) would make the blue work better if you want to keep this tone.

There is a lumbering giant, a potentially noisy duck plus the water. It seems like a formula for chaos. Yet, what I sense from this image is peace and serenity. Well done.

I wonder where this was shot as well. Searching with Google I do find several hippo and mallard shots, all taken at wildlife parks. There's even stock photography available: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-97152926/stock-photo-hippopotamus-and-duck-in-the-water.html

And there are several children's books on the subject. So it isn't a new concept. Strange one, but not new.

To me, one of the most engaging aspects of this image is having this massive, almost prehistoric creature emerge from a featureless, mysterious background fog onto a foreground populated with everyday objects such as small rocks and a completely banal, OOF duck (probably the most common type of duck in the USA).

I'm not sure whether to laugh at the setup, or think of it as harkening back to illustrations of menacing encounters in 1950s SciFi magazines, but whichever it is, I love it and wouldn't change anything.

Tom M

According to this map, the mallard is a northern hemisphere bird:

link

(The map shows that the mallard can be found along the Nile in northern Africa, but that is still in the northern hemisphere and far north of where one expects to find the hippopotamus.)

The hippopotamus species shown in the photo, however, is confined to sub-Saharan Africa, a very large part of which is south of the equator.

link

The likelihood of their being in contact in the wild in surely extremely remote.

As for the picture, I agree with Thomas Mann about the disparate elements. Perhaps they take away from the picture as a "pretty" picture, but I think that they add to the interest of what is shown--even if the shot was almost certainly made in an animal park of some sort.

--Lannie

I liked reading Jim Adams's thoughts about this photo.

I like the inclusion of the rocks and the duck. The duck being out of focus is mildly distracting to me.

Unlike Jim, I often wouldn't want photos I find interesting or even appealing up on my wall. I may well like something very much that I don't want to necessarily look at every day. I prefer a lot of photos in galleries, museums, books, or on line. That's just me. This is one of those. I think it's a good photo and brings a smile to my face. Not the kind of photo I typically gravitate, too, but I'm appreciative of it nevertheless. I like Matt's use of "Rubenesque" and think it's fitting. It has a certain boldness and also innocence that combines nicely. It's simple yet has a certain sophistication of approach and detail.