Eagle & Castle Rocks

[whited3]

Castle and Eagle Rocks are below the Split Point Lighthouse at Aireys Inlet, VIC. These from a recent sunset shoot.

Not great light and little cloud so I had to work with what I had. C&C welcome.

Castle Rock


Castle Rock on the left, Eagle Rock in the distance.


Eagle Rock


A smaller unnamed rock between the two.


Split Point Lighthouse

[Geoff F]

These look OK to me although with the last image I wonder about cropping a fraction tighter on the bottom and left side?

[Round Tuit]

All five photos are very good in my opinion.

It is unfortunate that you could not have moved slightly to the left when taking the second photo in order to separate the Eagle Rock from the mass on the right. Cropping the bottom up to eliminate the squarish pond might also improve the overall balance of the picture.

I would consider splitting the third one in two with the interesting foreground rock formation as one and the Eagle Rock as the other.

With the unnamed rock, I would consider getting rid of most of the sky and widening the crop ever so slightly if possible.

I think that the last one is the weakest. I would crop up from the bottom to eliminate the pond with the reflection of the lighthouse and in from the left side to remove the small section of sky that juts down besides the rock formation.

[DanK]

I find this sort of photography very difficult, and despite years of trying, I'm not very good at it. It's often surprisingly difficult (for me) to convert a stunning scene into an interesting photograph.

In this case, I think the first challenge is to step back from the obviously spectacular scene and ask: how can I compose a shot so that it will be appealing and will capture some of this beauty? While I'm not very good at this (which is why I don't do a lot of landscapes), I think I can offer a few basic suggestions that might help.

First, don't crowd things. In the first and especially the second, the interesting rock is nearly at the edge, which looks cramped.

Second, think about lines. The second and the last have nice diagonals. How can you frame this to make use of them?

Third, avoid distractions when you can. You'll see thousands of landscapes online with a lot of foreground material, but that doesn't mean it always works. I agree with Andre that you have too much in the last, and I would say in some others as well.

My final piece of advice is about processing, not composition. The texture of the rocks is what makes these images. In the last, the rocks are so dark you can't really see that. Even in the second, the rocks are on the dark side relative to the rest.

I did a very quick and dirty edit of the second one to illustrate these ideas. This is not a finished edit, but I hope it will make the suggestions concrete.

First, I used Photoshop's generate expand to extend the photo on the left and give the rock some room. This is just to approximate what you could get by framing differently.

Second, I brightened the shadows. I brightened them more than I wanted to make room for the next step.

Third, I applied a curve to increase midtone contrast a bit. This entails darkening the shadows and brightening the midtones or brights, in this case, midtones.

Fourth, I darkened the sky a little

Finally, I added texture--what is somewhat misleadingly called "local contrast". it's basically like sharpening, but coarser. You can do this in Lightroom with the texture slider or in photoshop by using unsharp mask with a large radius.

You may not like this result, but it works better for me. The foreground no longer distracts from the rest, and the diagonals play a bigger role. It doesn't feel cramped (to me), and the rocks are highlighted.

[billtils]

Yep - just compare it with the original and It's job done (but there's alight halo round the rocks).

[DanK]

Hmm. Didn’t notice that. It doesn’t look like sharpening halos. I wonder if it’s feathering of the automatic sky selection.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[DanK]

Hmm. Didn’t notice that. It doesn’t look like sharpening halos. I wonder if it’s feathering of the automatic sky selection.

Nope. I was wrong. I hadn't saved the image with layers, so I had to re-create my edits. The very slight halo is from the final step, adding local contrast. That makes perfect sense--it's like a sharpening halo, but wider and more diffuse.

The solution was easy. I copied the sky mask from the darkening layer, added it to the unsharp mask layer, and inverted the mask.

[whited3]

Dan,

Thanks for the detailed C&C. Much appreciated.

Re the too dark..............I'm once again conflicted in things like this. Things were getting dark as the sun was setting behind the cliffs to the right. The subject (or maybe the object) of the image was actually the sunset lighting the RHS of Eagle rock (centre frame). By lightening the image I feel the sunlight face is lost. In PP I try to bring out enough colour and detail as I can without actually changing the "reality" of the shot as taken and what I consider to be the subject, or point of.

That said, I also know that no one will see what I saw or felt or was inspired by.

..............My final piece of advice is about processing, not composition. The texture of the rocks is what makes these images. In the last, the rocks are so dark you can't really see that. Even in the second, the rocks are on the dark side relative to the rest.[/IMG]

[DanK]

Dan,

Thanks for the detailed C&C. Much appreciated.

Re the too dark..............I'm once again conflicted in things like this. Things were getting dark as the sun was setting behind the cliffs to the right. The subject (or maybe the object) of the image was actually the sunset lighting the RHS of Eagle rock (centre frame). By lightening the image I feel the sunlight face is lost. In PP I try to bring out enough colour and detail as I can without actually changing the "reality" of the shot as taken and what I consider to be the subject, or point of.

That said, I also know that no one will see what I saw or felt or was inspired by.

Sorry, I guessed wrong about the goal of the image, so my postprocessing suggestion was off base. However, that illumination is on such a small area that it's hard for it to serve as a central focus. It's not very noticeable.

Re not changing how things appeared at the time: that's obviously a matter of personal preference. Even though my taste runs to realistic photos, over the years, I have gotten more ambitious about post-processing. I agree with Ansel Adams, who once said that "the negative is like the composer’s score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance." If you want to watch a fascinating (to me, anyway) video about the dramatic changes he made from the negative to create Moonrise Hernandez, check out https://www.shutterbug.com/content/w...us-photo-video.

Here's one example where I definitely didn't want to keep things as I saw them. I was walking on a street behind the old port of Bergen when I caught this view. The lighting was awful, and there were tourists on the sidewalk.



It took me quite a while, but eventually I ended up with something I've exhibited:



But again, it's personal preference.