I like the early morning light and the way it hits the trees in the first image. That young buck is definitely cute too.
Thanks - it's early evening, in fact, about 20 minutes before the antelope.
Jeremy
Both nice shots. For the trees and cliff, in addition to cropping out the OOF grass at the bottom, try reducing the blue luminance on the sky to make a polarizer effect. Not sure if it will help, but worth a try.
Why did you decide to render the animal in B&W? I would have thought colour would work better in this case. In the B&W the tonality of the animal is quite similar to the background.
Where were the shots taken by the way? Is that a Waterbuck?
I've cropped it a bit more at the bottom and it certainly does look better. I had tried increasing saturation and/or decreasing luminance on the sky, but neither really worked.
Here's the original colour version of the buck, which is a young male blue bull in Ranthambhore National Park, Rajasthan (I'd hoped to see a tiger or two but had no luck). The shot was taken at about 7:30 and although it was only 20 minutes after the sunlit photo, we were in shade and the light had completely gone: the exposure was 1/200, f5.6, ISO3200, Canon 100-400IS L at 400mm. As you can see, there wasn't very much colour anyway, and with the inevitable noise from the high ISO I thought B&W was the way to go.
[attachment=14570:bull_2.jpg]
Jeremy