Rays of God

[Mattytanner]

Taken at Wellington Point in Brisbane, Australia using both a Cokin Gradual Blue and Cokin Gradual Tobacco Filters.

ISO 200
f/20
1/100 sec

[Dave Humphries]

... "and sea of blue",

Nice image Matt. well done for getting out there and trying things.

If I have one issue with it; it is the horizon.
This definitiely looks to be down on the right, but I also think I detect a bit of a bend in it too.
Obviously it would be better if this bend were fixed, but if not (I probably wouldn't - but that's not saying much), then at least it would be improved if horizon was evened up both sides, in my opinion.

Hope you don't mind the feedback,

[Lincs1]

A good advertisement for Cokin, to show what can be done

I like the sky, not so sure of the sea, the curve on the horizon does it no favours though

Thanks for sharing

Lincs1

[Mattytanner]

I don't mind the feedback at all. This is exactly what I want to hear to improve my photos. Cheers. I will go away now and touch up the horizon. I like the top half of the sea myself but the bottom third of the photo is actually where the tide had gone out but is still covered by the cokin gradual blue filter. I will see what the photo looks like again if that part is cropped.

[Mattytanner]

Hopefully I have fixed the horizon. It looks like it on my computer.



What it looks like when the bottom part of the sea is cropped out of the photo.


What are your thoughts!!

[Blazing fire]

I really love this shot. Do consider dropping a PM to McQ to see if this can be included in the gallery.

[Lincs1]

Hopefully I have fixed the horizon. It looks like it on my computer.

What it looks like when the bottom part of the sea is cropped out of the photo.


What are your thoughts!!

2nd works for me, that is lovely

Lincs1

[CNelson]

I like it! It's very bold and dramatic and more like a fantasy image but there is room for this type of image.

Chuck

[Dave Humphries]

I agree with Lincs1 and Chuck, the cropped version is really very nice.

The thing now is it's on a quarter, not a third.
If it were me (and a lot of people wouldn't ever consider doing this), I would expand the canvas downwards another 10% and clone the sea to fill the bald patch, done carefully so it needn't look fake.

To really fix it to be the perfect image, the right hand side just disappears into 'too dark' for me, I lose the cloud/tree line, can anything be done to pull it up (without becoming noisy), or clone something in there to give it a bit of shape? I don't think the RHS should be cropped off by the way.

Well you did ask!

Cheers,

[Alis]

There may not be a "horizon" in the usual sense of the word here; where the forest blends with the water is somewhat irregular and I think that gives the illusion of a bent or unlevel horizon.

It is a great picture, specially the clouds look so majestic, worthy of the title, specially if you believe in God! However, I think the water is too saturated and even distracting...may be a different color would be better to keep the attention on the clouds, specially with in the cropped version?

[Wirefox]

2nd image does it for me. Nice work.

[crisscross]

sorry to be a spoilsport, but even before I had got to reading the bit about filters, I was wondering why isn't the sea reflecting the colours of the sky?

Perhaps if you shoot without filters you can put on gradient selections from top and bottom and play with them a bit to push in a bit of extra drama, but keep probable?

[Colin Southern]

I really love this shot. Do consider dropping a PM to McQ to see if this can be included in the gallery.

I think you'll find that that's Sean's personal gallery

[Colin Southern]

I was wondering why isn't the sea reflecting the colours of the sky?

That was my first thought too - nice strong colours, but for those of us who shoot these kinds of things regularly it suggested "something not quite right".

Hope you don't mind, but I had my own attempts at an "alternate interpretation" ..



Cheers,

Colin - pbase.com/cjsouthern

[Mattytanner]

This is a similar shot without the use of any filters.

[crisscross]

Colin has worked on the lines I was suggesting it & commend his approach Matty

[Brigitte]

Wow, great shots.

regards,
Brigitte

[Mattytanner]

I don't mind Colin's interpretation of the photo either. It just goes to show how everyone's tastes are different. How did you go about making the changes?

[Colin Southern]

Hi Matty,

I just did a few basic things ...

1. I thought that the image looked a bit unbalanced being quite dark on the right hand side so I added a horizontal graduated fill in a seperate layer and used a soft light blend to lighten it up a little.

2. I thought that the immediate foreground was too distracting, so I cropped it out - which tended to edge the image towards a 2:1 aspect ratio.

3. Since I wanted a 2:1 aspect ratio I re-sampled the image to achieve this.

4. In a similar vein to what Chris mentioned, I didn't like the way the colour from the sky was absent from the water, so I selected the water and added an orange filter (turning the amount up quite high).

5. I wanted more control over saturation levels so I added a hue-saturation-brightness layer, and upped the saturation.

6. I gave the image a sharpen with a USM

Quite a difficult to work on the image since the resolution was so low and many of the tones were quite "polarised" (ie very dark with little shadow detail left, or very bright with little highlight detail left).

Hope this helps