Version 2 of Elephant lit by Laptop

[stockphotojourney]

New composition and added a little light from a flashlight.

[tomw]

Hm. Hard to tell. I'll list things I notice and then you can decide what to do:
I notice two different light sources - the harsh outside light from the right and the flashlight from the left. You probably can experiment with various black and white conversions to eliminate the color difference.

No light on the eye, which is usually the focal point of something living (or pretending to be living )

The elephant is looking left, while, at least in the Western world, since we read from left to right, our eye looks at a photograph from left to right. If you switch it around (Or just mirror it in photoshop or something) then you can probably get a more pleasing photograph.

Hope that helps!
-tomw

[FrankenPengie]

Thanks for sharing this little experiment. What a great subject to work with! I'd like some detail on how you set up the shot. It kinda looks like a light-box but then...

It does look like the flashlight is too direct. I agree there needs to be more light around the eye and basically everywhere that's dark. The contrast seems misplaced. I think the direction is fine but there should be more rule-of-thirds croppage to the left.

[Olivier H]

I like the difference of color between the two light sources.

You could pay attention not to cut the elephant's foot

As said, there lacks a light on the eye... but lighting the eye without having harsh hilights everywhere would be a tedious thing to do... If you find a way to achieve this, that would be great.

[jiminyClickit]

stockphotojourney,

Confused yet? You can show it to a hundred people and get that many variations on it. In the end, one version will appeal to you and you'll live with it.

That we try to discover what a person is looking at, is instinctive. If we come into a photo from the left to the right, see the elephant looking left, we bounce off that look to see what it's looking at, nothing there, back to elephant, stay there a while, absorb what we see while there. Grab a big catalog or anything with hundreds of photos and see which ones keep your attention longest.

This elephant is better; crop is tight and distracting. Lighting is varied; more to the front on the left side would get the eye and balance the difference in light color more. It's a good subject to study lighting with. Good work-in-progress.

[stockphotojourney]

Thanks everyone!

I left a large space open because my end goal is to upload this to microstock sites so presumably the empty space in the photo would be filled by the designer that (hopefully) uses the image.

I have a crazy idea on lighting the eye that I will try tonight, I will also take a shot of the setup. It is crazy simple.

Thanks again everyone!

[tomw]

JiminyClickit: that was amazing. Well said.

Stockphotojourney: as an ex-designer, I would say don't worry about composition of a stock image. Of course you can lure the designer in by a better composition...but the designer doesn't actually need it. I just "rendered" the images I wanted out of the original and opened a new document, the size that I wanted.