Red Fox in the Dunes

[Jared Lloyd]

At last the kits are being allowed out of the den sites! Ive been staking out a series of dens up on the 4x4 area of the Outer Banks waiting for this. The first sighting just happened to coincide with the last day of filming an episode of Wild Photo Adventures. Thus you will probably be seeing more of these little guys.

Jared

[NCBobD]

Love the expression on their faces. The color is really nice. Great job on locating and photographing these, at least for me, ellusive animals.

[artsnimages]

I love the light on these Jared and the "all natural" surroundings. The folks over on "Scapes" would frown because of the grass but, I say , "Let them Eat It"........Super nice piece of animal photojournalism...........

Jim

[Jared Lloyd]

thanks guys. Funny thing about "scapes" and BPN is that the photos everyone gets off over, are not all that salable - at least from an editorial and stock perspective.

[artsnimages]

thanks guys. Funny thing about "scapes" and BPN is that the photos everyone gets off over, are not all that salable - at least from an editorial and stock perspective.

I think they get off on their "Ego's"...............I remember my favorite comment as a Photo Editor at Nat Geo to a lot of the new Photogs; "Cut the Artsy Crap.......I wanna see habitat!!!!!

Jim

[NCBobD]

I love the light on these Jared and the "all natural" surroundings. The folks over on "Scapes" would frown because of the grass but, I say , "Let them Eat It"........Super nice piece of animal photojournalism...........

Jim

thanks guys. Funny thing about "scapes" and BPN is that the photos everyone gets off over, are not all that salable - at least from an editorial and stock perspective.

I think they get off on their "Ego's"...............I remember my favorite comment as a Photo Editor at Nat Geo to a lot of the new Photogs; "Cut the Artsy Crap.......I wanna see habitat!!!!!

Jim

Not to hijack the thread or draw attention away from Jared's fine red fox photos, but this kind of clicked with me and a discussion in the "scapes" Southeast forum concerning a waterfalls image I posted. They just hate that I selected an exposure that didn't force the stream part of the image to go all silky smooth. Part of the story I was trying to tell with the image was about the clarity and cleanliness of the mountain stream. For my vision I wanted to see the rocks on the bottom clearly. I also wanted a lot of DOF so much of the environment would be in focus, sharp and crisp. While I did need to use a GND filter, which I didn't have, a little work in post solved most of the "hot" area problems. It just seems they feel there's only one way to present a particular scene and any other representation is just wrong! If I had to shoot to conform to everyone else's vision photography wouldn't be so fun!

And, of course, maybe I'm full of ..it. :rolleyes:

In case anyone's curious: http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=178167&p=1753078#p1753078

[jckegley]

Oh, fun fun fun Jared. Great shot. Both yours and Jim's Red foxes are eating away at me. Waaaay jealous.

Love the placement of the subjects in the photo (not centered). Like Jim said, I also love the grass in the photo. The environment adds so much to this photo. Having the foregound grass, yet no background distractions is perfect.

If the grass blades had crossed over one of the eyes, I would definitely make an issue of it, but the blades don't. Eyes are everything, at least for my taste. I am tickled you got to capture this. Looks good, real good.

[Jared Lloyd]

lots to think about and discuss here. I think Jim is in a unique perspective to comment on this topic being that he was a photo editor. From my experience working with photo buyers, they tend to shy away from the artsy stuff which seems to be best left for fine art. Even with landscapes now, the human element has become extremely important for sales. Something of course that some forums strictly do not allow. Yet, they outsell landscapes without the human element 100 to 1 now a days in the editorial market. Galen Rowell commented on this before his death about his first experience working with Nat Geo. The photo editors didn't really know how to work with his photographs because they all looked like post cards and calenders. Then of course there is famous photograph that Nick Nichols had in Nat Geo of an elephant. The photograph was blurry, underexposed, flash blew out the eyes, and the camera was not level. Yet the picture was ran as a full page. Why? because it was a photograph of an elephant in musk chasing Nick through the forest. He managed to turn around and snap off one photo as he was running for his life. It told a story and was far more interesting than the technically perfect elephant photographs that saturate the market already.

BPN and Naturescapes both lean towards fine art in thier critiques. Nothing wrong with this of course seeing how that we all strive to be artists. Just realize who you are showing your work to, and where thier tastes lie. Its just like entering photographs into a photography competition. Spend the time to review the previous years winners and then select your photographs accordingly. All that stuff is so subjective and based more upon individual taste than actual artistic merit.

Now in regards to the fox photos here, I would have no quelms about making a large print of this and selling it as fine art. One thing I have learned is that photo buyers, the general public, and photographers quite often all have different opinions as to what is good. There is so much psychology involved in selling art that any photographer who manages to become succesfull as a full time nature photographer probably deserves an honorary PhD in psychology. Selling fine art prints of wild horses has been a crash course in this for me. Those photographs that I like the most, sell the least to tourists. They tend to lean towards the standard run of the mill photographs of horses walking down the beach with the ocean in the background and a baby in tow. Folks that are dropping $500 or more on prints are going back towards the artistic realm which I prefer. Only thing is, Ill sell 50 matted and bagged photos of the horses walking down the beach to every one large photo. So the question becomes do you shoot for the tourist or the art buyer here?

With the photograph that Bob is discussing its simply a matter of how you sell your photo idea. If you were trying to emphasize the pristine nature of the stream, get it into one of the environmental stock companies and keyword the shit out of it with phrases like "pristine" "clean" "pure" etc. . .

These message boards unfortunately often times breed homegenity with photographs. Resist! haha

[NCBobD]

The topic of selecting images to present in gift shops, for stock use, for contest submission and for contests is a bit fascinating to me. However, I hate to see this particular image post derailed any further. Hope no one minds if I restart this in the Open Topic area.