Photofeedback #6: Hungry springhare photo by @pentaxke!

Good afternoon Steemit!
Unfortunately I wasn't able to post a new #photofeedback in the past few days. I had a pretty bad strep infection in my throat and I didn't feel fit enough to focus 100% on a new photo review.
Luckily I feel quite a bit better now! The fever is gone and all that's left is a sore throat and a difficulty speaking. A perfect day for a post, because typing is possible with my mouth closed haha!

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And there is news! @pentaxke submitted a photo by using the #photofeedback tag on his feed. He liked my earlier reviews and decided it was time for a review of one of his own pictures. Thanks @pentaxke for being the first one to submit a photo in this way!

He has a nice online gallery on ello. You can check it out here: https://ello.co/pentaxke. Also check out his feed here on Steemit and leave him upvotes, follows, resteems, love, Walmart coupons, whatever you think will help him grow his Steemit account.

@pentaxke came early to work, because he mixed up the weeks. Not wanting to go back home, he thought it would be nice to visit the zoo very early in the morning. Because it was still dark outside, all the nocturnal animals were awake and running around. One little fella kept running around while he was trying to take a picture. Just at the moment he wanted to give up and put away his camera, this South African springhare decided to sit still and @pentaxke managed to shoot the following photo:

Camera & settings:
Fuji X-pro 1
XF 35mm f/2 lens
Aperture at f/2
Shutter speed at 1/40th
ISO at 6400

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Some first impressions:

• Let's start off with the camera and settings: I really like the Fuji X-pro series and the prime len.. STOP! Just look at how cute that little springhare is looking at the camera with its puppy eyes!
  Well, as I was trying to say, I really like the Fuji X-pro series and the prime lenses you can use with it. Prime lenses are great for learning photography and composition, because you can't zoom with them. If you want to 'zoom in', you have to walk to do so. This really lets you think more about your composition than just adjusting your zoomring and taking the shot.

This picture was taken at very low light conditions, so you need your diafragm to be fully open to capture the most light possible. This lens' maximum aperture opening is f/2 and that's exactly what @pentaxke used to shoot this picture.
In these light conditions, you also need the lowest shutter speed possible. If you handhold your camera, 1/40th of a second is about as slow as you can go without introducing camera shake in your picture. I think @pentaxke did a good job with these settings (or maybe it was on Auto).
The ISO at 6400 is the maximum ISO value for this camera when shooting in JPEG. The camera chose this ISO automatically because of the low light conditions. That brings me to my next point..

• There is a huge amount of noise in this picture. Because of the absence of light, the camera chose a very high ISO to compensate for this. High ISO has one big pro and one big con: it's super helpful when shooting in low light conditions, but the higher it gets, the more noisy your picture becomes. Combine this with the very small file size (only 315kb) and you can understand why this picture is so noisy.

• Damn, that animal is cute..

• I think the composition of this picture is nice, but not perfect. I like how @pentaxke managed to shoot this following the rule of thirds. The front paws of the hare are exactly the intersection of the lower and right third of the picture.
  There is a horizontal line that leads me to the subject and also a vertical line that more or less does the same.
  So there are some elements that make this a nice composition, but what I don't like is the balance in the picture. Almost all the visual weight is on the right and bottom side of the image, which makes the rest of the image feel a little bit unnecessary. Sometimes negative space really adds to a picture, but I think in this case it is more of a distraction, especially because of all the noise in the dark part.

• I think what makes this picture a nice picture, is the animal itself. If there was, let's say, a cactus standing there, I think the photo would be a bit boring.

• But luckily there is no cactus in this picture! There is a beautiful little animal which @pentaxke managed to shoot with great timing. I really like that!

• The image is a little bit underexposed. This will be easily fixed in Lightroom.

• I like the story behind this picture. @pentaxke arriving for work way too early, decides to go to the zoo to see the nocturnal animals. How often in your life do you see these animals jumping around..
  The story raises a question by the way: at what time does that zoo open its gates?!

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I imported this picture into Lightroom and made two quick edits, which in my opinion improved the picture quite drastically. Here's the first one:

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What did I do and why?

• I used the 'noise reduction' function in Lightroom. I dragged it all the way up to 60 out of a 100, to reduce the huge amount of noise in the picture. One big con of using this, is that by adding too much noise reduction, the image begins to look more like a like an aquarel painting or something. You can see this a little bit in the dark part of the tree. Details begin to fade and melt into each other.

• I adjusted the white balance a little bit, by making it a bit cooler (more blue-ish).

• I upped the overall exposure and added some contrast.

• After upping the exposure, the dark part in the top left began to look purple a bit (because of the small file size I guess). After seeing this, I reckoned it could be nice to make this part even darker. So I decreased the shadows to -100 and actually really liked the results. My focus automatically goes more to the hare now.

• I made the whites in the picture more white. The white part of his fur was a bit gray and washed out, I upped the whites to make his fur look more natural.

• I like to play around with the dehaze slider in my pictures. I also did this with this picture and I found out that by adding some dehaze, the springhare came to life a bit more. It seems that there is more contrast and vividness in the colors of its fur now.

• I added a little vignette, to decrease the brightness on the edges a bit.

• There are some wood chips in the original picture that looked very purple. His ears looked this way too. To reduce this, I decreased the saturation of the purples in this picture to zero. The wood chips and ears look much more natural now.

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I also made a second edit. Actually I just used the first edit, but cropped off a whole lot, to make it more like a springhare-portrait:

This edit emphasizes the cuteness of the animal a lot more, but it takes away some of the context and his habitat.

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What would I do differently while standing there?

• Normally I would say ''wait for better light conditions, or bring a flash'', but in this case none of these were real possibilities. These animals disappear when there's more light and using a flash would definitely scare the animal.

• I would wait for the hare to begin eating and then shoot some more pictures. I can only imagine how cute it would look if this little hare was eating a nut or something haha!

Conclusion:
I really like the timing of this picture. @pentaxke waited and waited and then decided to put his camera away. But at that moment the springhare sat still and he was able to take this shot. @pentaxke managed to capture the cuteness of this animal. It has a look in its eyes that says 'please, please give me some food' :).

Because of the low light conditions and the small file size, this picture came out very noisy. This is distracting and not pleasing to the eyes. Luckily it was possible to restore this a little bit in Lightroom so that the focus shifted more to the subject.

The story behind this picture is nice and really made me fantasize about @pentaxke walking around in a dark zoo, taking pictures of animals.

I think I like the second edit the most. This one is more like a close up portrait, showing more detail in the fur and really showing that hungry and innocent look in its eyes.

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Thanks again for reading my post and a special thanks to @pentaxke for submitting this photo via the #photofeedback tag!

If you like what you've read, please don't forget to upvote and follow this account for more photofeedbacks.

What do you guys think about this picture? And which edit do you like the most? Please leave a reaction in the comments to tell me what you think!

And remember, if you want one of your pictures reviewed by @photofeedback, please create a new post on your feed containing the picture and the hashtag #photofeedback and I will review it for you!

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