Butting Heads

In the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone this past week. I had just pulled in to a turnout and was getting my gear out when I noticed these two bulls moving towards each other. I shot this offhand at 300mm and they moved apart right after the encounter. Pentax K20D, Sigma 100-300 f/4.

A very unique and exciting moment captured!

The fairly deep shadows that obscure the detail in the heads is unfortunate. If these were raw files, you might have some success in post-processing trying to bring out whatever details is captured, along with brightening the show, which is a bit on the grey side, with a slight blue cast.

Hi Steve

Agree with Don… Lot of shadows, color (not on snow!) and details can be recovered, i did on your small image…
Don is right about raw, but even in JPEG there's some easy improvement to briing to this capture that desserve it!

Thanks Don and Nicolas. I had received a lot of negative feedback on this image elsewhere as well. I exposed this scene at +1 EV plus +1 bracket stop and now +1 stop in post processing. No excuses but obviously I need to work on exposure on overcast snow scenes. Here is the image at +3 stops.

Hi Steve,

That is much improved from the first version.

I almost aways shoot in manual exposure mode, and in this situation would have spot-metered the snow, and make sure that was up around +2 or so. Then I'd take a test shot or two to tweak the settings, and then shoot away.

Of course, that isn't possible when you come upon a scene like this and have to capture something before the moment is over! It sounds like you did the right thing, pushing EV up a stop (perhaps 2 would have been better), and then bracketing on top of that. That snow must really have been bright!

Thanks for posting.

Thanks Don. The light was actually dull and flat which is probably why the image needed so much more exposure. There isn't very much detail in the shadows either which probably points to the same thing. I think the matrix metering may have been fooled with all the white snow. If I had center metered the scene wouldn't the snow have been blown out? I'm headed back in a few weeks and I'll experiment with some different exposure modes. Here's an image from the Old Faithful Webcam.

Steve Robinson said:

If I had center metered the scene wouldn't the snow have been blown out? I'm headed back in a few weeks and I'll experiment with some different exposure modes.

Click to expand...

With automatic exposure modes like Aperture Priority, and the various metering strategies (matrix, center-weighted, etc.) it's tough to know exactly what balance the camera is going to make, and therefore how much you need to tweak it with EV Compensation.

But you're correct, metering that emphasizes the dark brown buffalo bodies has the potential of blowing out the snow, depending on what you do with EV Compensation.

The solution, when you have the luxury of a little time to tweak your settings, if you're using Av, is to make your best guess, and fine-tune it with a few test shots.

One of the reasons I shoot with Manual Exposure mode is that in the scene you shot, I only have to meter once, and that will be the correct exposure (assuming that the lighting conditions don't change) regardless of what I'm shooting - the snow, small buffalos in the snow, large buffalos in the snow, etc.

Food for thought.