dude steve

It took a fairly long exposure to grab this moonlit scene (with the

very last remnants of the day peaking through the holes in the cliff).

 

Let me know your thoughts on this one, thanks!

simple is definitely the way to go. very nice graphic. really nice tones

Hope you enjoy it...let me know what you think :)

Other than the great idea to compress the width, the oversharpening works fantastic here and was another great idea. I've used both techniques before, but never to this extent and never to this good of a result.

Shot along the breakwater nearing sunset amidst powerful waves and

gusty winds.

I like how the lighthouse is fully enclosed within the reverse-C cloud shape. Moving more to the left to space the sun further off would have ruined this effect.

 

No crop necessary. IMO, an alternative would have been to shoot from the same spot and turn the camera to the left a bit. Though it might have gotten too dark to left...

Nice touches of warmth to this very cool toned image. The only nit I have is with the spot of orange reflection in the top-middle of the water area.

 

I wouldn't like to see anything cropped from top because it would make the lighthouse feel cramped given its already foreshortened height.

what, too busy? are you serious? no way. It's a bunch of birds. Any "busyness" among the birds is an integral part of the scene. And you caught this frame and a wonderful time to catch the central bird in mid stretch. fantastic!

comments welcome

Thanks, Jim. That's a crop I've been considering.

 

The lower rock actually isn't nearly as featureless as it looks here, but cropping it emphasizes a pretty strong diagonal balance and classic thirds. While I like that, I also think that I already have plenty of images with similar diagonal balance. Yet, I think most people will like it better cropped.

...in a good way. It's rare that I see so many elements come together like this yet still work this well. This is an image where I can let my eyes wander.

another from my growing collection of seascapes.

Thanks for the comments! Christine's comparison is particularly interesting. Very cool!

 

Mark - yes, it is.

Just throwing this one out there since I haven't posted a critique

request in a while...comments appreciated, thanks!

Ah. Those foul bastards! ;)

Chris, you haven't received a bad rating, yet. What are you complaining about low ratings for?

 

It's very nice, but I like II even better.

An unusual beach - the waves crash way back where you see them, but

every few minutes a wave would come up and move the rocks around. The

key was to wait for a wave to start to recede so you could see where

the rocks moved to, find a good selection of rocks, run up to it, and

shoot before the water receded too far. A fun shot.

 

Comments appreciated!

good job, well done!

It's a very nice scene, but the execution didn't quite work. The sky is too blown out, and the reflection of the blown-out area looks like it was filled in.

 

The only ways to get this right are to either use a graduated neutral density filter on the sky or to shoot this scene a little earlier, expose for the highlights, and then use a photo editor to bright up the levels in the foreground.

This is very nice...I'm not fond of the space on each side of the red poles, and would crop both sides to do so. This leaves the rightmost chain leaving on the right hand side, so a further crop from the bottom would get the chain to exit on the bottom of the frame again. Something to think about.

Thanks for the comments.

 

FWIW, I took a more exposured frame and personally found it much less interesting, but I can see why some people would dismiss this as "too dark".

The horizon is a bit tilted (I made the same comment on your other beach sunset)...make the effort to get it as straight as possible. It really pays off.

not bad...but a little more care in your composition will go a long way - for example:

 

1) you *really* need to be more careful about crooked horizons.

2) there's a rock in the surf to the right that's jutting out from behind the foreground rock. It would likely be better to hide it completely behind the fg rock or bring it completely into frame.

 

I kind of want to see more on the bottom and less up top, but I can't say for sure that your choice to split the horizon was a bad choice. However, if you had done this:

1) the (somewhat blown-out) main sky element would have been closer to the upper left and would have better balanced the large rock in the lower right.

2) you would have captured more of the reflective wet sand, which is one of the most interesting parts of the image.

 

Again, it's not bad...actually, better than average. I took a quick look at the rest of your posted images and in general I like your eye and think you can do better than this image.

Thanks for the comments, BTW!

 

No, I didn't have to do any tweaking of the sun - the small aperture and the GNDFs did the trick.

 

On a couple of compositions ("Pacific I" is one of them), I had to use two separate GNDFs (one angled over the sun, one straight) to bring the entire sun and sky region into range and completely eliminate blooming in the sun area.

 

I don't recall if this was one of them but I think it was.

One image is just the cliff, and the 2nd image is everything else.

 

The full size version looks fine, but I'm starting to think the version I posted here is a bit dark. And the medium-sized version here seems to have lost quite a bit of light in the scaling.