Rate my Photo
This reader has captured all the atmosphere of the moment – but who’s that behind the stag?
Mist, motorcycles and photo feedback
Our reader Adrian Harris
Recently I spent a lovely morning at Windsor Great Park. At this stage it was still dark, so a high ISO setting was a necessity. I shot lying down, with my back on my camera bag to get some stability.
The stag was gradually walking from right to left, and I just clicked when it obscured a walker coming up the hill from Windsor Castle. It was taken at 400mm on my 100-400mm lens and a Canon EOS-1D X Mk II. I have cropped it in a bit, and the colours have been boosted slightly. My exposure was 1/640 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 6,400.
Our expert Andrew James
The atmosphere in this photograph is fantastic, and I don’t think it matters one jot that you needed to use such a high ISO. There is a tiny bit of noise, but it doesn’t detract from the photo. I just love how the mist is hanging in the dip between the stag and the castle. It almost doesn’t look real.
The timing of your shot is perfect, as the stag is in the perfect place for this composition. Shooting low has also given you the ideal viewpoint to make the best of the scene.
If you zoom in, you can just see that walker behind the front legs of the stag. I think you could remove the walker to clean the shot up even more. Some people might say that’s not the right thing to do, but the walker isn’t a vital part of this scene.
There is also a little bit of chromatic aberration (colour fringing). You could easily get rid of this in your raw software with just a tick of a box.