Storm at Daybreak

[Wheeler McDougal Jr.]

I have never tried sunrises and so I can certainly use some advice on this one. For the last 6 weeks I have been fortunate enough to be living in a house on the coast in Florida and every morning I have been shooting sunrises, some good and others not so good. Shooting data follows:
Nikon D3S
2012:03:15 06:57:55
24-70mm @ 29mm
29mm (in 35mm film)
1/100 sec, f/18
Mode: Manual
Metering: Multi-segment
ISO: 400
White balance: Auto
Flash: Off
File size: 170MB
Image size: 4256 x 2832
Color space: AdobeRGB
Saturation: Normal
Sharpness: Normal
Contrast: Normal
Color profile: Adobe RGB (1998)

[Angelika Schauf]

Very nice dramatic cloud atmosphere.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Very nice, Wheeler. I love the rays, the strong cloud formation and the overall mood/simplicity here.
I do feel the water is a tad underexposed and could be brought back up a notch. Ideally blending multiple exposures would've worked a treat here (or shooting with a neutral density filter).

How's this B&W conversion I quickly processed? I felt this has a good graphic quality for such an experiment...:bg3:

[Andrew Aveley]

A great image , suggest a crop above the wave on the left hand side , some highlite recovery and up the contrast to make this one pop a little more. I tried with this file but size made for poor repost ! Morkel , filters are great idea nd could take this up a notch with exposure balancing :) Wheeler , keep shooting !!!

[Robert Amoruso]

Thanks Morkel, just what I was thinking.

Mac,

Great dramatic light but not a lot of color so a B&W treatment really amps this one up IMO. Great the yiu have rain coming down and I like that you included enough of the God Rays and did not limit the big sky view. I would have liked a bit more FG to allow more of the sand to show and have an untruncated wave line in the FG - but a minor quibble to be sure with this nicely executed image.