The image is of captive animals at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, AZ. Scanned from a print of a Fuji 400 film. Canon FD 600/4.5 with an EOS A2 body, at about f/8 and 1/15 sec.

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), March 05, 1999

Answers

Brain fade! It can be the only answer.

How about "gray foxes", they are obviously not red foxes. If necessary, I guess I'll have to call the ASDM and verify.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), March 05, 1999.

This is a lovely image. The positions of the fox's heads make a fabulous symetry, and the framing is imaginative. The right side of the upper fox's head seems to be a bit bleached out, and to have lost a bit of detail, but I suspect that that is in the scanning.

-- David Bertioli (david@cenargen.embrapa.br), March 05, 1999.

I like it. The foxes are "nestled" nicely in the frame. The upper fox's headturn leads my eye back into the frame, and the lower fox's head turns still further to continue the motion of that strong diagonal. I assume that the dark border under each fox is the black of the fur on the tail; in which case it works nicely to lock the foxes into the frame. Well framed, well done.

-- Mike Green (mgprod@mindspring.com), March 05, 1999.

A very appealing, well composed and peaceful image. Excellent!

-- Garry Schaefer (schaefer@pangea.ca), March 06, 1999.

A beautiful and flawless composition and I love the way its colors blend with background. The only drawback is the hotspot on the neck of the animal. I am sure it is from scanning the print. The negative must have plenty of detail. Thanks for sharing. Bahman.

-- Bahman Farzad (bahman_farzad@spotmetering.com), March 06, 1999.

I guess the white area simply exceeds the scanner's contrast range. Maybe, as I do more scans, I'll be able to figure out how to compensate for this kind of artifact. The scan is from a minilab 4x6 matt finish print, when I get more time, I'll try scanning the neg and see if it works better.

Also, the only digital correction made is to sharpen the image with an "unsharp mask" filter in Photoshop 4.0. I did this because the original 50K jpeg image looked extrememly soft on the screen even compared to the low quality print. Large scan files (5 meg+)looked sharper.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), March 06, 1999.

The composition is first class! I think you would get a sharper scan from a gloss print. You should try playing around with the Levels in photoshop to adjust the contrast back to what you saw.

-- Larry Korhnak (lvk@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu), March 09, 1999.

Make the image more personal. Crop the left side so that a small part of the "red" fox is cropped off. I find that this tigher composition keeps the eye in frame instead of letting it wander out at the top left.

-- Paul Lenson (lenson@pci.on.ca), March 16, 1999.

Yes, I agree, cropping the left side about as tight on the animal's head as the one on the right does improve the image.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), March 21, 1999.