Crowded house

[Gerhard Weldhagen]

Tightly packed snails on a weathered farm fence post taken in the late afternoon in South Australia. Canon 5DS R, EF 35mm f1.4, 1/320, f8.0, ISO 160 on tripod. Comments welcome

[Warren Spreng]

Love the colors and the different textures.

[Ron Conlon]

Interesting approach with lovely textures and colors, as noted. I find the light a little harsh, and I wonder how a tighter or looser approach would look--either filled with snails or more context.

[Diane Miller]

Great find! I'd love to see the highlights tamed, though.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Interesting shot, if possible I would try not to clip the shells on the edges or at least the one top left. I think I would play around with the highlights and shadows using curves to lower the highlights and raise the darkest shadows a tad.

[Diane Miller]

Using curves to lower contrast will often give a less-than-pleasing result. Worth trying, but I'd suggest three other things.

If you're using Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom for raw conversion, the Shadows and Highlights sliders will give adjustments much more specific to those areas. If midtones are too flattened, a tweak of Clarity will bring them back.

If you're limited by the tonal adjustments in a different raw converter, you can often achieve some very nice results in PS with Nik CEP's Detail Extractor, used judiciously, and often combined with the Tonal Contrast adjustment. Going to even more specific targeting of tonal ranges, there are the luminosity mask techniques. I never find then necessary for general tonal adjustments such as you have here, with the power of the adjustments in Lightroom/ACR.

[OvidiuCavasdan]

Nice find. I'm thinking about a tighter composition. Also might try a more pano crop and black and white conversion.