daverave

That's an interesting comment Tony and one that I see on many photographs in landscape forums. My personal opinion with regard to shadow detail is that I think it is overdone in many cases in an effort to provide detail that really doesn't contribute a lot to the image or composition.

I sometimes see photos from very, very good photographers that have gone overboard in the effort to wring every last ounce of opened up shadow.  That can result in quite flat, unnatural looking light and color. I think the darkness can be essential in providing drama and focus on the star of most photographs, which is the light. It's comparable to an oversharpened, "crunchy" image... just because we can doesn't necessarily mean it's better.

Thanks for your many comments on my New Zealand series. I'm going to try and whittle that portfolio down to 60 or so shots because I'm only 2/3 of the way through the processing of images from all of the wonderful places we went!

Warm regards, Dave

I like your crop a lot Tony. One problem I was having was timing the waves with a 3 second delay on the shutter... I think I would have preferred the wave on the other side of the bird. I kept thinking the bird might fly away so I was rushing a bit, then it turned out he sat there for several minutes anyway.

Thanks for the info on the f-stop/sharpness issue. I guess I was under the impression that the smallest apertures led to the better sharpness, maybe that's only on wide angle lenses? I tend to use the zoom telephoto a lot because it helps isolate pattern, etc. and eliminate sky. That's probably a result of doing a lot of California landscape where chances are the sky will just be a pretty boring bluebird blue due to cloud shortages.

I really like this shot too Tony. It's too bad that high tide was at sunrise because there would have been terrific color reflection with lower water levels. That said, the kelp's not a bad element.

BTW, Jeff, I agree that the foreground could be brighter. It took me a minute to take care of that in PS and I subbed the brighter one (I think.)

Thanks for commenting, Jeff. I've read of that grad technique before but don't see how that would work with the circular grad that I carry what with my fat fingers and the edge of the filter. I can only assume that one would need a Lee or Cokin-type grad to make that work, right? My kit is pretty low budget and as light as possible to reduce strain on my fake hips.

It would be pretty simple to brighten up the foreground in PS.

Early morning on a golden sand beach in Abel Tasman NP. Best thing: no sandflies ;-)

Very sharp image of an interesting place. I usually don't like lens flare but it works pretty well in this case except for maybe that last big one.

I agree with Hamid, about the foreground not doing a lot for the image. I thought that this was a moonlight shot at first viewing!

This is a fascinating image, well done. I might try a version with cropped to eliminate most of the cityscape outside of the closest columns.

Everything looks great except for those psychedelic yellows in the clouds. Maybe some desat there would be appropriate.

Excellent front to back!

Beautiful!

This is fine art indeed! I'm undecided as to whether the slightly out of focus top and bottom of the image is the way to go though.

Lots of interest in this well executed image. Nice job!

Super comp and balance with interest throughout. Masterfully processed.

Perfect, evocative winter scene. I might consider cropping off some of the foreground snow but a 7 regardless.

Looks completely natural (and frigid) to me, Jeff. The light on the ice and the sun rays do indeed make the shot.

Beautiful B+W image, Zsolt. I might try and take a little bit of the bright out of the largest patch of snow.

After waiting out a steady, all-day, hard rain, we arrived at Scott's Beach on the Heaphy Track on the west coast of New Zealand. The setting sun dipped below the clouds and turned this stream that had broken through a bar on the beach into a river of gold. That "cliff" on the right is about a meter high and that's the breaking surf in the distance. Magical evening... 

Thanks Tony!

I've been real busy trying to work/process 3,500 images from a month in New Zealand so I've been kind of absent lately. I should start uploading the best to PN in the next couple of weeks.

I used to be a bit polarizer addicted myself back in the film days but l've found that backing it off a bit from it's full-on effect is a viable compromise with digital and/or you can recreate the effect in PS for the most part. It's most useful on wet surfaces as you mentioned.

There's potential in this image in terms of composition but I think that it could have been better with a bit less polarizer... that big black/blue hole in the sky looks very unnatural and is a major distraction.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment Tony.  I don't mind anyone messing around with my images... that's the whole point of PN in my mind, constructive feedback. BTW, you've been on my Interesting Persons list for several years ;-)

I was looking at a blog post on Ian Plant's website (a world-class landscape photographer) and we had a bit of a discussion about this blue in the shade question.

http://www.ianplant.com/blog/2012/12/17/understanding-and-selecting-the-best-white-balance/

According to him, our eyes do not accurately see the blue color in shadows (which is reflected blue sky absent any other source) and the camera sensor actually sees it truer somehow. Lately I've been rendering some more blue in those areas than I used to do based on that but I'm not sure that I'm intellectually convinced of that yet... it's a bit counter-intuitive. I certainly can see your version probably being truer to what my eyes saw that day.