Boundary Bay

[Dave Leroy]

I am taking an online photo course and one of the assignments for this week is "Leading Lines".

Since I live close by, and this is pretty typical winter weather I wanted to try for a local scene.

50D, 17/40 at 20mm, 1/50, f11, ISO100.

This is looking pretty much straight south early morning so sun is poking around on the left a bit.

Dave

[Nick Palmieri]

I am thinking the strongest leading lines in this image are in the water on the left FG leading to the sky. I think these can be more emphasized by cropping about a third off the right. This would allow your eye to start in the lower left corner and follow along the shore to the sky. This image has a real nice feel to it.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Dave,
Very good advice by Nick! He is correct that the water line is the strongest and then the loud line. The bright patch in the LL is blocking that line a bit. If you can't alter/crop the ration.....go with toning it down and perhaps dodging and burning around the water line to make it even more of a leading line. Tweaking the cloud line will also help in that area. Just keep in mind that you want leading lines to lead you to something.....so while the distant mountain works......Nicks crop suggestion will also make that more prominant so if you can crop....I would probably go that route of a combo of crop and tone down of the LR.

[Dave Mills]

Hi Dave, good advice above. I looked at the crop suggestion and it seemed to work well.It did put more emphasis on the LL. Toning down the areas mentioned should help the overall image. Good capture..

[Dave Leroy]

I like the advice about cropping out and/or toning down the lrc.

Now that i look at it again I think I could have also taken a big slice off the top as well.

Tks,

Dave

[Robert Amoruso]

Dave,

I cropped right and top and toned down the highlights (see below). What I posted is a screen capture showing my layers palette. Not the BG copy created using the method below and then black painted on the dark part of the sky to remove the affect. Please neglect the color shift which is a function of my computer and not what I did below.

Create BG Copy

Channels Palette - CTRL Click on the RGB channel. This creates a selection of the highlights.

Layers Palette - Create BG copy

Create mask using highlights selection - this mask is a grayscale mask

Adjust opacity - I have 94% - to liking.

I painted black on the mask in the dark cloud areas.

[Dave Leroy]

Thanks Robert.

That is a pretty neat way to select the highlights.

I like your crop much better than mine.

In hindsight I think I made two errors on this one. I some how got fixated on the trc and wanted to include the tiny bit of blue sky. It needed to go.
And the lrc I actually had tried to bring the highlights of it out more to attract attention as another leading line which detracted from the better part of the photo. :o

Dave