Goat (Before & After)

I read about this cool technique on of the blogs I visit regularly- Quotidian Photography. She also did not come up with it herself, but saw images done this way by Wolf Ademeit on 500px. The idea is to post-process the animals photographs taken in zoo to remove all distractions- colors, human-made obstacle and decorations. Simplify. It is achieved by black and white conversion and darkening the background. The resulting images show just the animal, they are not environmental portrait in any way, but are focusing on the form and shape of this particular species. Take a look by yourself.

Quick look through Lightroom library to some of my early zoo images, and I found this goat. The image had a potential. Slightly underexposed, but with interesting light/shadow play. I did not like the overall color scheme of the image, perfect fix with black and white conversion. And I wasn’t sure about the background- not districting too much, with the shallow depth of field, but I did not feel crazy about either. I turned it into black and white, and adjusted tones. It did not help the eyes, so I treated them with the Local Adjustment brush by itself. What a change in the fell of this portrait.