Fort Fisher, North Carolina

[Kevin Giannini]

Hello - This was taken around 6:45AM with an 8 stop ND filter. I've been practicing my longer exposures with water. I was drawn to the clouds that morning, and I wanted them reflected in the water.

Canon 7D
18-135mm IS
f/18
15 sec
ISO 100
tripod

Performed standard ACR and CS5 processing with levels, clarity, some NR in ACR. I also performed some dodging on the reflections in the water to bring them out a bit.

Thanks for looking and for any suggestions.
Kevin


118426

[Andrew Aveley]

Interesting scene and after 15 sec no movement in the clouds :) Two things to look at for me would be some LCE (Local Contrast Enhancement) and maybe cropping a ad off the bottom to just under the rock to give more focus on the leading line of the cement circles ?

[Kevin Giannini]

Thank you Andrew, those are good suggestions. I will try cropping a bit off the bottom. Do you have any suggestions about how to do localized contrast? I have ACR and CS5 but most of the stuff I do is global, except for the occasional dodge and burn.

Thanks again,
Kevin

[Robert Amoruso]

Kevin,

See my tutorial here http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/20434 for LCE (scroll down some).

I would agree with Andrew's comments. Having the line of pilings starting closer to the bottom would create a much stronger leading line. Ideally in the field, aiming up would have been the thing to do.

[Rachel Hollander]

Kevin - good suggestions above. I think I would consider more of a pano crop eliminating the rock and the first cement circle as an alternative.

TFS,
Rachel

[Kevin Giannini]

Robert - Excellent tutorial - since I haven't spent much time in the landscape forum, I had missed it. This image was cropped somewhat, so I do have a bit extra sky available at the top, in order to crop the bottom, and still maintain the 3:2 ratio which is what I try and do with a horizontal composition.
Thanks!
Kevin

[Mark Wiseman]

Hi Kevin,
I like your image and agree with the suggestions made above. I would start the bollard at the RHS corner as Robert has suggested. I like the affect of the water and the slow S/S, but agree with Andrew and I am a little bit suprised that one cannot see that movement in the clouds. A lovely image and thanks for sharing.
Best wishes,
Mark.

[Kevin Giannini]

Thanks Mark, All good suggestions. I took a series of these images all between 10 and 20 seconds - this was 15 seconds. There is movement in the wispy clouds in the right part of the sky, but the poofy ones were fairly stationary. In fact, when clicking between the different images I took, there is very little movement of the main clouds between images. I'm glad, at least for this image, since I would not have preferred to see blurry clouds here, and I didn't take any short exposures of this!
Thanks,
Kevin

[Morkel Erasmus]

Can't add much more here Kevin. Nice peaceful scene. Love the strong cumulus clouds. Running the suggestion by Andrew/Robert on it would definitely add some punch there.
Crop suggestion is also A+.