Tramore Beach, February (C&C)

DadaKopf

I was messing around teaching myself luminosity masks and spotted this photo I'd missed months ago. Whatcha think? Bits of the beach have totally lost definition, and I don't know how to retreive that. On the sand. The sky looks OK, though. Anyone have any ideas?

run_Forrest_run

sorry, I've become obsessed with horizons in pics...is it level?? Anyway yeah I like this pic but the sky seems washed out, pity there's not a little more blue in it. I like the dark (grainy?) affect of the beach though.

Fajitas!

The horizon isn't completly level, mainly due to some barrell distortion, with a horizon so prominent in the shot, I'd be onto that straight away.

I don't mind the sky being so blown out, but I wish there was more to look at, it could possibly have been more interesting from a lower angle - I guess Tramore is only out the road from me, so I'd see this quiet a bit! The sea is a bit bland aswell...

Possibly a low contrast B&W conversion would work?

JMcL

It's a nice sky, but on the whole there's nothing in the shot really to hold interest. In terms of improving it, what I'd do is straighten the horizon, crop it so that the horizon sits 1/3 the way up from the bottom (crop it into a panoramic format 2:1 probably). There're a couple of ways you can try to improve the exposure balance. The best, especially if it's a raw, is to produce 2 images one with exposure for the sky. I posted a thread in the Digital Darkroom forum a while back here. If you can't do that, you could use dodge/burn in Photoshop to lighten the foreground, and maybe darken some of the highlights in the sky a bit

DadaKopf

I see what you guys mean about the photo lacking interest. Fair enough. Though it was the desolate feeling to the photo (perhaps partly dependent on the composition) that struck me.

I'll mess around with it more. Really, I'm not thrilled with the photo, but just wanted a landscapey type photo to experimen with those crazy Photoshop techniques.

m_stan

I quite like the photo, and while it does lack a focal point - something interesting in the foreground - I think it can be improved with some simple tweaking in Photoshop.

Assuming you have Photoshop ...

I read a good article in Practical Photography magazine this month on Photoshop layers. I'd been using them for years but never really played with adjustment layers. Wow they are cool !

This tutorial on adjustment layers shows how you can get some detail into the beach area of this shot. In addition to this, a simple crop to remove the really dark clouds at the top, and a quick straighten of the horizon will improve this a lot.

DadaKopf

Here's the original, for comparison: