these need help Lake Michigan

I just got through reading the responses on your CC forum posting. You got a lot of good advice. Something which I would add is that if you want to stop the action and freeze the water you have to use a vary fast shutter speed. Something like 1600 or above at least if you want all the water droplets sharp. I do not know what S/S you used here but the waves are still a bit blurry. If you can get down lower to the waves, with a longer focal length lens and narrow the scene to a specific rock or area where the waves are breaking strongly, you may find the result more dramatic. Certainly worth some experimenting at any rate. In this shot, I find at least for me, that some of the drama is robbed from the scene by the amount of background. The context of the wave lets me know we are talking about a smallish wave and a standard boulder. If you try getting in tighter the context becomes more ambiguous. That way the scale becomes slightly irrelevant and the composition and the power of the stopped wave become the focal point of the image. Another benefit of a faster S/S is going to a more open aperture and narrower DoF which also works toward focusing attention of the breaking wave rather than having the views eye wander around amongst the rocks on the beach in the background.

As to the other kettle of fish. I have a rare last name so when I google my name it is easy to track down the people who are right clicking and down loading my images to other sights and there are a lot of them. A few sights in Korea have download dozens of my photos, set them to music and made slide shows. The ones I worry about are the ones I can't track down because those are the ones that are not giving me credit. I always post my images at around 100 kb with the widest dimension 800 and the dpi 72. This pretty much restricts the use of my images to the web. I may be naive but I figure if small jpegs of my work are showing up around the web with my name attached it is free advertising.

I will quickly relate a story that occurred last week. I have a photograph of a musician posted in my music folder here at PN. Unbeknown to me the musician has been using this image on her own web page. I have been given credit for the image and I am fine with it being used by the artist, although I was never directly asked for permission. When I got home from a music festival in Quebec last week I had an offer to use this same image as the front cover of a jazz and classical magazines June edition, provided I could supply a full sized file to use since the tiny jpeg from PN is useless for printing to full magazine cover size. So here we have an example of someone using one of my PN images for their own purposes and it working very much to my advantage. So long as I only post small jpegs on the web I do not feel threatened by someone using them, so long as I am given credit.

Rachel, I got here through your comments on Gordon's post and I thought I'd share a few thoughts about image theft.

Even if you choose a site with image theft protection (like flickr allows), you need to know that no image theft protection is all that effective. Print Screen will still work and a displayed image can be extracted easily. Even burying the image in a flash file isn't 100% effective. But, it is perhaps the best of the available protections.

I decided to put a simple frame with my name on it into all my posted images. That way, a thief would have to edit my photo itself to take my name off. If they are willing to do that, then, they would have done a print screen to steal it as well.

Just FYI.

I have no helpful thoughts on your image as I haven't photographed water very much at all. Sorry.

Thanks, my friends.

I'm going with adding my name, making it smaller, and saving at 72. Best I can do, I figure.