The longer you look at this image the more you realise that there are actually two sets of reflections occurring here… one in the water and another across the left and right of the photograph, making the two pairs of zebras in the background appear to be a reflection of one another.
Two things initially strike me about this image.
First, there’s that small bit of bank jutting into the bottom left of the frame. If you hold your hand up over it you realise it is not essential to the image. In fact, the image works better without it. Sometimes creating a good photograph isn't so much about what you choose to include in the frame as what you choose to leave out.
Second, there is a slight tilt on the horizon. It can be tricky to get the horizon perfectly level when shooting but it’s a relatively simple thing to correct in post-production. Small details I know, but in photography it's quite often the little things that make all the difference.
Photoshop and most other programs have
grids that you can turn on within the crop tool to help you align the horizon as
you crop. As an initial fix I
would simply crop the top and bottom of this image and align the horizon
at the same time.
Now… that is a simple
fix, but if you want to get clever there are a couple more things that you can
do. In the image below I have actually “squeezed” this photo using a tool in
Photoshop CS5 called Content Aware Scaling. It is a clever tool that lets you
remove “dead” space within a scene without affecting the scale of the main objects,
in this case your zebras.
I made one small cheat in doing the scaling… I copied
the zebras in the upper right, only because one of them was getting skinny
during the Content Aware Scaling… to do this all you need to do is select them
with the Marquee Tool, then do a copy and paste. This small copy can stay on
the new layer while you apply Content Aware Scaling, then all you need to do is
put the zebras on the upper layer where you need them and clean up any edges.
Now the last little tweak I made to the image was to add some warm haze. This is rather simple… all you need to do is create a new layer above everything and then use the Gradient Tool to paint in a warm orange tone to the foreground and the sky. The only thing that you need to be aware of is that in the Gradient options you will need to select the “Foreground to Transparent” option so that you do not fill in the central area of the picture with the background colour. Draw the gradient tool down over the sky, and then hold down the Shift key and add more gradient to the foreground… all you need to do then is adjust the transparency of this layer back to about 10 or 20 percent and you are in business.
Cheers for now, Image Doctor
Botswana Reflections - Image Doctor's edited version
