C-Street

anonymouscuban

Went surfing early this morning. Before I left, I remembered I had my camera bag in the car so I decided to shoot a few photos. Nothing that spectacular but I thought I'd share.

I played around a bit with different shutter speeds to practice getting just the right amount of motion blur in the water. I never seem to get it right. I tend to slow it down way too much. I think it turned out well in this shot. I also practiced some of the curve adjustment stuff I just learned too. BTW, I used an ND8 soft graduated filter on the shot.

Feedback welcome.

1/8 second @ f/18


I guess I'll throw this shot in as well. Same settings.

dereksurfs

In the first image the water motion is alright in terms of shutter speed. However its not that appealing in my opinion since its brown/muddy looking. Also the sky seems really dark while the foreground is overly bright.

In the second shot the big, bright rock on the right side dominates the entire scene and dwarfs the surf, ocean or any other possible interesting compositional elements. It also seems overly bright in the lower half. Because of this imbalance the eye is immediately drawn to the right corner (brighest rock), away from the rest of the scene.

IMO the grad is unnecessary on a cloudy day like this as those clouds act as a natural filter already. When applied on a day like this the frame gets too out of balance.

I would recommend a different composition down there with a few more interesting elements, maybe the pier or???

anonymouscuban

Thanks for the input Derek. These shots are not great, especially from a compositional perspective. Maybe not even worthy of sharing. As I mentioned, I was surfing and decided to grab a few shots before I left so I didn't spend a lot of time finding a nice shot. My main objective was to take a few shots of moving water with different shutter speeds. I decided to play with these two shots in PS using some curve adjustments. I darkened the sky a bit in post. Maybe I went overboard. I like moody images but maybe this one I forced too much.

dereksurfs

Yeah, I checked out some shots on your site and you have a lot of killer ocean scenes. This I would chalk up to fun experimentation. Surfing and photography sounds like a great time and still beats work any day right?

I hesitated posting. But I hate when no one responds simply because they would rather only give praise. That said I really like your work, and that is no BS!