Sunrise at Anhinga Trail, ENP

[Raul Quinones]

This is my first post in the Landscape forum, this is a little intimidating for me, landscape has prove to be the more challenging aspect of photography to me.
This was taken at Anhinga trail on a foggy morning.

I actually attempt to combine two jpgs' one converted for the highlights and one for the shadows using HDR.

Comments and recommendations are welcome.

Canon 1DMII, 100-400
1/40s f/9.0 at 100.0mm iso200

[Robert Amoruso]

Raul,

I think you did well here especially combining the two. The BG shadows have good detail - the bush on the right is probably better in your original then in the JPG post. I noticed you mentioned JPG conversion. Are you using RAWs? If not, give it a try as you will have much better control - a gentle nudge. :)

Compositionally, it works out well. I might have let the sun get a bit higher but you don't have any intersections here so that's good. I would also prefer the gator more left. I know that he would be looking like he is swimming out of the image but I think getting the tail more away from the dark reflection would look better.

All around, nice work. My comments are small tweaks that will help you visualizing next time your out. BTW: You captured the mood of the scene quite well.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hi Raul,
I think you've done well with your first post. As Robert stated you have definitely captured the mood. I was leaning to telling you about cropping of the bottom........where there is a bright area in the lower right.........if you are comfortable with it............eliminate it to remove it as a distraction or just crop it out if not.
roman

[Raul Quinones]

Thanks for inputs,

Robert, I do shoot in RAW. I process twice the same picture in the raw converter, one for highlights and one for shadows, and then did the work on photoshop. I know I should be converting to TIFF but old habits are hard to change.

Roman, Thanks, I will get rid of the bright spot.

[Michael Pancier]

you should consider Photomatix pro which creates hdr images from single raw files. It's perfect for these.

I like the comp. and would only crop a tad off the bottom. nice work.