A quiet time

[bodi]

Teach a lad to fish, you will instill in him many useful (in life) qualities.

Bob

[jiro]

Nice image, Bob. Good use of off-center composition. My small comment would be the blown highlights. Other than that a very strong image with a story behind it. Good shot.

[bodi]

Thanks Jiro. What would you do with the highlights? Most of my pictures are sooc other than a crop.

[jiro]

Thanks Jiro. What would you do with the highlights? Most of my pictures are sooc other than a crop.

If you can use Lightroom, you can adjust the recovery slider to the right to recover some of the highlights back. If you have photoshop, the easiest route would be to copy the background layer and set the blending mode to multiply. Then, once you did that, apply a mask to affect only the areas with blown highlights. Hope this helps, Bob.

[jiro]

Bob, I checked your image in photoshop and I'm afraid the bright areas are beyond recovery. There's no detail whatsoever than can be recovered on those areas. The only workable solution in my opinion is to borrow pixel data from another image that has sand detail in it and then superimpose them on the foreground.

Here's the most that I can do for now concerning the image, Bob. I hope I did not offend you on the edit. This is just one of the possible ways to handle this kind of issue with the image:

[bodi]

Thanks Jiro for taking the time to explain. Most of my pictures are sooc except for a crop. I have Elements 8 but really would rather try to get the picture as I see it in camera rather than spend (for me) a lot of time trying to doctor a shot that I'm unable to get right in the camera.

[jiro]

In that case try to spot meter on the most important part of the shot and use that as your exposure guide. In this case, I would point the spot meter of the camera at the skin area of the kid. Don't forget to shoot in RAW so you have some extra leverage on the edit. All shots can benefit a lot even with some extra post-processing after taking the shot.

[bodi]

Jiro, Thanks again. I'll try raw again. I'd pretty much given up on it a couple years ago.

Bob