sooner centennial special Cowpoke

Another shot from the Oklahoma Centennial 2007 Chisholm Trail cattle

drive. Comments welcome, as always.

As a record of the event, it's a great shot ... the horse eating, the cattle in the background, and the old timer with his chaps and bandana tied up. But photographically it's a bit too bright - I played with it just a tiny bit ... brought up the dark level (I'm still not good with curves), and think it looks a tad better. Your thoughts?

Well, it certainly looks punchier, and I don't have a problem with it. It may look better to most people. On my 21" LCD monitor, it looks a little over-cooked. I think we get so used to looking at over-saturated photos in this digital age, that we forget what the scene really looks like sometimes. I'm not sure I have discovered the magic line between "making it look better" and "making it look fake" yet.

 

From a realism standpoint, the chaps in your version are way too orange, as is the dead grass on the side of the road. One problem I had, of course, was that it was raining (by the way, the K10D handled the rain well, just like its supposed to) so the exposure was affected by the sky being white instead of bluish.

 

I like your version, too.

 

Cheers

Thanks, Barry - I guess I didn't look closely enough at the color of the chaps. But the sky around his head was what I was shooting for. I'm sure that if I knew enough about selective PS work on certain parts of an image, I'd be better at fixing things like that. You're a good sport! :-)