Zebra compositions.....

My wife shared the camera back and forth with me at the zoo and this photo was one that she took. We both were frustrated as they only had two zebras and then the only thing they were doing were munching things off the ground. That was one good photo, but they would never raise their heads or move around.
Finally one raised it's head and my wife snapped quickly, there is no time to plan. The ending photo was a good shot of the one zebra but the other was partially out of the frame. From my years of teaching composition I messed with this photo for a while and I ended up with three compositions that work.
I found that I could crop it vertically and make the one zebra the center of interest. It makes it look like the shot was planned that way. The foreground zebra is just window dressing describing an environment .
The next try, I cropped it into a vertical layout. As an artist, this would be a great composition telling maybe a more mysterious story. The zebra with it's head up appears to be alerted from something moving in the bush. Not in real life but it sounds good, right.
This last photo was cropped to give you a very artistic appearance. The length actually complements the idea of stripes. A wildlife artist name Robert Bateman from Canada would probably paint this scene because of the design qualities of the stripes and the textures of the land.
When I take photos I do like to get a good composition from the start but sometimes I find I just have to work on it to be right back at the computer.
Lastly, enough of the teacher lecture, I painted this afternoon in the heat and humidity. I just have too much for show and tell to put it all on one blog, so tomorrow you can see the paint job. Thanks for reading......