This is a great photo study of the primates, especially if you're just starting out, as you imply. You have nice, Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro lighting of some these animals, which is good focal illumination for faces of most of the gorillas and the orangutan(?). The only basic suggestion I can offer is to modify the light reflected from the eyes of some of the individuals. Eyes are very important, especially for animals where we focus on the faces. The large white patches on the eyeballs are distracting and block out the pupils and other eye details. Your compositions invite us to look into the eyes of your subjects, but some of them have most of their eyes whited out. If it is your light, and you are doing more of this work, maybe try changing the position of the flash, or whatever illumination you're using. If it's something in the ambient lighting outside your control, you may be able to fix this in PhotoShop. For example, this is especially important for the otherwise very nice sitting portraits of the gorillas. The apparent ring-flash reflection in the eyes of the mandrill(?) is pretty macabre, something to avoid unless you were specifically going for the shock factor. It detracts from the otherwise interesting composition of the finely focused hand on the finely focused chain-link fence that is confining this unhappy-looking animal. A more minor suggestion: on the orangutan(?) portrait, the bleached wood is too bright, and doesn't do a good job of framing the animal. If you can't re-shoot the photo, I'd suggest cropping and cloning it out of the photo. It is otherwise a beautiful image.
You have many very nice images here, well worth tweaking to maximize their effectiveness.
Comments
You have many very nice images here, well worth tweaking to maximize their effectiveness.
Keep up the good work.
---John