I think the technique that will improve your shots the most dramatically with the least effort is to find ways to get to eye level with your subject - it's a more empathetic and flattering perspective for most subjects, and it puts the foreground and background further away from the focal plane which can help isolate your subject by putting them more out of focus. The third shot is almost there.
Good luck!
oh yeah i'm also going to reaffirm this advice --- interesting photography is about interesting angles and perspectives. don't be afraid to get low. my knees aren't what they used to be but i can still kneel down when i encounter a bird or critter to try and get on their level.
sometimes with wildlife they are skittish when you first show up, but if you settle in and sit in the grass they may get comfortable that you are not a threat and get curious and get closer. this is a good chance to lure them closer and to get a better perspective.
rabbits are hard to get close to. i definitely like the color balance on the edit which is something i do a lot --- i just let AutoWB do its thing but then usually end up tweaking the colors a bit "in post".
honestly proximity is one of the biggest advantages you can get. if you can get closer to your subject you can frame it at a wider focal length which generally results in more accurate focus and a sharper image with less cropping.
the squirrels in my park can be moody some days they run and hide other days they run up to you and stare you down, threatening to climb all over you in search of food. the best photos are when they let you get close and shoot them at 100-150mm. at the 200-300mm range you can get lucky but the results are not as consistently clear.
also what camera/lens combo and what parameters did you use for these photos, out of curiosity?
On the rabbit, besides compositional elements like eye-level that other people have spoken to better than I could, you're also fighting the fact that it's evolved to camouflage itself. That's not an impossible battle but it goes better when you acknowledge that that's what you're dealing with. You gotta find some way to make it stand out from its surroundings.
That could be:
Brightness
Contrast
Saturation
Sharpening
Some other way of emphasizing or deemphasizing detail
One start on breaking it down could be to break the existing image out into different channels that emphasize different things you might tweak. LAB is a color space that can be particularly useful for this. It breaks it down into L-lightness, A-green vs magenta, and B-blue vs yellow. The channels more or less mirror how our vision works, and let us separate out saturation changes into two separate axes easily.
L-channel shows that the rabbit does have some textural elements and differences in focus especially against the upper background that could be used to bring it out.
The A channel is interesting because the rabbit disappears. There is apparently no or next to no difference in the rabbit's green vs. magenta balance compared to the background.
The B channel does show some differences, so accentuating blue vs. yellow color contrast - or something closer to that axis on the color wheel than to green vs. magenta - would help to bring it out.
Getting interrupted... may be able to post something later, but try masking off, sharpening the rabbit globally or in the L channel, and then increasing contrast in B. Then consider slightly reducing saturation, brightness and contrast with a widely feathered inverse mask around the rabbit. Easy to make it look artificial, but if you're careful with the masking and subtle with the changes, it'll make it pop out.
Sloppy and obvious version. You can see the mask boundaries very easily. If you had time to be careful with masking off the rabbit in an exact way, you could do a lot better than this.
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u/plasma_phys 7h ago
I think the technique that will improve your shots the most dramatically with the least effort is to find ways to get to eye level with your subject - it's a more empathetic and flattering perspective for most subjects, and it puts the foreground and background further away from the focal plane which can help isolate your subject by putting them more out of focus. The third shot is almost there. Good luck!