In adding a little Australian flavour, here is a wild, mature, male, eastern grey kangaroo.
Unfortunately, the contrast of the shadow across the face appears a little darker after the scan than on the slide.


Details: Canon EOS-5, Kodak Ektachrome 200, 850mm, late afternoon

-- Adam Liedloff (a.liedloff@qut.edu.au), August 31, 1998

Answers

Bad composition (cropped way too tight), bad light, bad pose (full frontal).

I give this a 3 (it looks pretty much correctly exposed, but that's about all I can say). This image doesn't say much about the animal (none of the truly distinguishing body features of the kangaroo are included in this shot) and it doesn't look particularly marketable. Although it's difficult to tell from this JPEG, it doesn't even look all that sharp. I would have certainly tossed this shot.

-- Sean Yamamoto (seany@altavista.net), August 31, 1998.

I have to agree with Sean.

-- Paul Lenson (lenson@pci.on.ca), September 01, 1998.

I like the frontal pose. I think that even tighter cropping might help here: crop a narrow band off the top so that his ears "poke above" the frame for a nearly square composition.

The lighting is the thing I dislike -- too harsh. Softer lighting would allow a better feeling of intimacy (kind of a face-to-face feeling) by allowing the eyes and their expression to come through more.

I wouldn't toss this picture but I'd relegate it to documentary use.

-- Patricia Lee (patricia.s.lee@lmco.com), September 01, 1998.

No "catch" light in eyes -- ' should have used a little flash or done in Photoshop. Is it REALLY sharp???? Doesn't look like it. Composition is symmetrical, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if photog capitalizes on it -- i.e. if that was his "point".

-- Lester LaForce (102140.1200@compuserve.com), September 02, 1998.

In response to the comments, I could have gone to any wildlife sanctuary and taken the classic phot of a kangaroo that everyone has, but I was trying for a shot even Australians are not used to. Actually this photo was taken at 5:00 am, so I had the best lighing conditions for the day. It is a mature male standing about 2m tall and I followed this individual for about an hour and took the photo from about 25m away. This photo only had a little cropped off the top and bottom. I have a heap of more "normal" shots but I wont bore you with them. The photo does have glints in the eyes, that have not reproduced in the scan and a flash was not an option. Thanks for all your comments.

-- Adam Liedloff (a.liedloff@qut.edu.au), September 02, 1998.

Because it was shot with a lot of mm's I assumed it was not an easy photograph to make. But there's usually no extra credit given for effort. It is, unfortunately, just a mug shot. I've got plenty of photographs which, I've learned, will always mean more to me than they ever will to anyone else. So be it. Pete

-- Pete Dickson (dickson.pn@pg.com), September 03, 1998.