water water everywhere Setting Sail on Cowichan Bay

Is it underexposed?

It doesn't appear underexposed to me, what made you think it might be? I doubt that opening up the exposure would have revealed any more detail on the background mountain, that's just haze. The haze has enhanced the image IMO by providing a less distracting background bringing more attention on the boats. The reflection from the sail is very nice and you have kept detail in the bright area in the water in front of the big rock and in the sky at the upper right. You've lost detail in the shadow area of the foreground rocks, but I'm not sure it matters. You could have cropped out the two smaller rocks in post processing but would have either lost your aspect ratio or made it too tight on the sides. A better choice may have been to have raised your camera a little. or stepped in, to exclude them while keeping the large one as an anchor and foreground interest.All in all, I think you did the best you could with the light conditions you had to work with.

Jim, I asked because of the point you made about the shadows under the rock, but I do like the light in the sky and sail. I agree about the smaller rock, which at a quick glance looks more like a black hole. I thought of cropping above that but it ate too much into the beach. Thanks for your well considered critique and for answering my question.

Hi Hanna. How did you post-process this one ? What was your approach ?

 

What I mean is it looks like a extremely high contrast scene in the foreground and right side, but the background water and hill are low contrast. This would be a challenge for anyone. I would probably develop 2 different frames in ACR and then carefully merge in photoshop to create the lowest noise, most amount of detail photo possible.

 

When looking at this in a histogram I noticed that the highlights are slightly clipped.

Hi David. I don't think I did much to this; probably just curves and a slight crop. I debated lightening the shadow under the rock but decided not to. I don't do much processing because I've only recently started shooting RAW. It took me a long time to do that and now it will take me another long time to learn to work with it. I am totally right brained. Unfortunately we lost the hard drive a few days ago and with it two months of images from the time I started shooting RAW, so back to square one.

Very sorry to hear about your hard drive..... That really hurts.... I am mostly left brained--if you ever want some help on a tough one just drop me an email. You've helped me a lot with encouragement over the years and I'd love to help out with some post processing suggestions.

Thanks David, I'll keep that in mind.

Hanna,

 

It is interesting to observe the difference in people's reactions toward the color image vs. black-and-white photo. In b&w image, dark area without detail is generally accepted by viewers as it is.... but for color image, viewers usually react immediately, saying "I want to see the details in that shaded area."