'Salmon Creek Estuary at Very Low Tide'

The moon is on the far side of the earth, unusually close in its orbit and

all the water is attracted to the far side of the earth just a little drawing

tides down in the near side of the earth to what is called 'minus tide'

levels, as here in this salmon creek tidal estuary where water flows into

the Puget Sound near Bremerton, Washington. Your ratings, critiques

and observations are invited and most welcome. If you rate harshly,

very critically or wish to make a remark, please submit a helpful and

constructive comment; please share your photographic knowledge to

help improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

A nice capture. I like the grain of the image but there's quite a bit of detail lost in the shadows. I would recommend trying to extract some more of the detail out of the shadows to make for an even more appealing picture.

I wander, why you not included the camera data. To give you a constructive comments it would be necessary. I Guess, you used the auto mode setting, like "A" priority and the camera exposed to the high lighted area, the sky. I don't know why the image is looks so under exposed and over processed showing all those noises. I like to help you with this image but have no idea what the original file contain. No rating was added.

Your comment is well intentioned and the advice is good.

I set a new camera I was experimenting with for 'easy exposure' to a minus exposure setting by some distance, otherwise this would have been exposed for a constant 'grayscale reading of whatever the camera called for 17% or !8% grayscale, I forget which it is.

I did not want that, but to emphasize the curvature of the creek channel in the estuary, and I wanted to do that in the capture.

I can be a post processing idiot sometimes, because this was purposely underexposed, then in post processing I underexposed it some more, all to emphasize the curvature of the creek channel as it lay mostly barren in the drained estuary.  I didn't want the surrounding vegetation and soil to detract, but I went overboard, I see.

Same with the distant clouds. In film the emphasis in post processing to emphasize the clouds would have worked easily by burning them in, but in digital, it was a failure, so the clouds are much brighter and the attempt to burn them in turned to digital noise/grain.  Ah well.

I probably should substitute images, perhaps retaining this as a guide so the critiques are not lost.

This really was a different image as it came out of the camera.

I am not afraid to make mistakes, and I welcome the critique forum for pointing out the ways to make my captures better, and that includes you of course.  Thanks for the critique.

john

John (Crosley)

Hi Bela,

My habit since I shoot primarily street is to eschew shooting and exposure data as being mainly irrelevant.  In a landscape perhaps that is not such a good idea.

However, the story of exposure is set forth above, and perhaps you can see that this is just an overprocessed image and it really would have worked with film but doing the same with digital and without 'smoothing' resulted in unwanted noise.  Also, I had the info necessary to fill in the detail, lower right and left, but simply made a choice to de-emphasize it to emphasize the composition.  I should have laid off my heavy hand in post processing.

As I noted above, I may repost here and save this image as an attachment so you can see the original AND my heavy handedness.

It will be a shame for the loss of detail in the clouds which were much brighter than they show here, but still gloomy in their brightness.  I would have been advised to shoot this as a minimal HDR for the range of brightness, then merge the captures, but I was without a tripod.

Ah well, live and learn.

And thanks for helping me learn.  You are always welcome here.

john

John (Crosley)