During my last visit to the Brookfield Zoo, an infant gorilla was quite active in the Tropic World exhibit. I captured some images with my Nikon D800 and 200 f2 lens. I also used a Nikon SB-900 with a Better Beamer to introduce some fill lighting on my subject:

Here's the final photograph:

GorillaFemale infant gorilla at the Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois on February 22, 2016 In some photography forums, viewers asked if I made any edits to the picture during post processing or if this result is straight out of the camera. I always shoot RAW, so edits are a way of life. But, I made a few more edits than I normally do while working with this particular file.

Here's the out of camera picture:

GorillaFemale infant gorilla at the Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois on February 22, 2016 And here are the edits that were applied to the original file to get to the final result. First, I imported the RAW file into Lightroom and made a few quick adjustments:

• Shifted image to introduce a tilt
• Cropped image
• Brought down the Highlights a bit (-7)
• Introduced a black point (-24)
• Added a touch of Vibrance (+5)
• Added Lens Correction (Auto)
• Corrected Chromatic Aberration (Auto)
• Exported to Photoshop

Within Photoshop...

• Cloned out the vertical branch
• Removed the flash reflections from the eyes
• Removed the blue cast on the fur
• Adjusted the Hue of the background color to a deeper green
• Used the Multiply blending mode to selectively darken the background, the branch and portions of the fur
• Added Gaussian blur to the background
• Exported to Lightroom

In Lightroom:

• Sharpened image
• Exported jpeg

So, how much time did all this take?

From beginning to end (from import to export) took me about ten minutes. I liked the capture enough that I thought it was worth the ten minute investment.