Sunday, 15-Jan-12 11:02:00 CET

Red deer in the sunset

Yesterday I went out to make another photo of the red deer in the Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve park. It was late in the afternoon and a bleach sun going into a sunset. Next to the edge of the park is an area of greenhouse companies. I made one photo of the sunset in the direction of the greenhouses.

When I walked into the forest immediately I came across a couple where the woman had just bought a Nikon D3100 and she was more fascinated by my camera than the deer. She had not brought her camera though? You come across many photographers in this forest indeed! We talked about photography for a little while and I forgot to give her my card.

I continued into the forest and soon I could see the herd of red deer from the path. I stick to the path because that is one of the rules you have to follow in this forest. Between the trees in the afternoon in the forest the light is more shallow and not having so much contrast. I had the camera set to “sport” for the convenience. No manual settings this time. The focus was set to manual. Because of all trees and things you cannot be sure of that the motive you are interested in will be the same thing the camera decides that you need to have in focus so then it is better with manual focus.

When I came home I had to do some post processing the photo of the red deer, I used Gimp 2.6:

1. Cropped the image to Golden cut 21:13 with horizon on 1/3 from the bottom and space in front of the animals on the right side.
2. Applied levels to get more dynamics in the colors, I made the curve fit the entire diagram.
3. Duplicated the image into a second layer, this is the “sharpen” layer.
4. Added a grayscale mask to the sharpen layer. Switched to the new mask.
5. Applied “Find edges” filter in the grayscale mask.
6. Applied levels settings so that the edges are white and inner areas of animals are black in the grayscale mask.
7. Applied selective Gaussian blur so that inner parts got less edges in the grayscale mask.
8. Switched to the image of the sharpen layer.
9. Applied sharpen.

Voala!