This shot was from a swim I took at the beginning of last month. I had originally planned on surfing but the conditions looked to good not to shoot and the lighting only kept getting better.
Specific Feedback Requested
Mainly post processing as I was pretty happy with the composition on this one. Unfortunately I blew some of the highlights as the sun kept moving in and out of the clouds and changing the light pretty drastically. Also its not easy to change my settings on the fly with any kind of accuracy while my camera is in the water housing. I did the best I could to recover them although I might take another crack at it and re edit the entire shot.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Canon 5d Mark III in an Essex water housing with a 50mm 1.4 Lens
Shutter Speed: 1/1250 Aperture: 5.6 ISO:200
We don’t get these types of shots very often so this is special for me. I don’t think you have to be a surfer to appreciate this. The horizon seems a bit tilted but it might just be the wave itself.
For me, I really enjoy the somewhat shallow DOF, particularly for the foreground portion of the wave. It gives it a sense of presence and the rush you’d feel in capturing the wave as it passes–not enough time to see the whole thing clearly to capture every detail. Thanks for sharing!
Wow, great work. This one has to be seen large to be fully appreciated. I love the use of selective focus here, the curl of the wave looks very sharp and crisp, and the OOF LLC places even more attention on the sharpness of the curl. What i enjoy most about this image is the way the light is interacting with the water, creating some interesting colors and highlights.
The URC exposure is not fully blown, i think it should be more recoverable. This image is so interesting that it would be well worth investing the time to tweak this further.
Kudos for not surfing. That’s a fair effort in itself as the conditions were amazing on that day. I like the 50mm look here, so many barrel shots I see are shot super wide which distorts the almond shape of the curl.
From a processing perspective I’m inclined to raise the midtowns in the sky and educe the contrast in the clouds.
This is flat out gorgeous and a unique POV, David. Perfect timing IMO. My only suggestion would be to try and capture a little more detail; if possible; in those couple of bright spots in the clouds. I would say you did a fantastic job considering all of the variables here.
Outstanding. I’d say the focus was just right. If anything, I’d crop a bit of the sky off the top to minimize the blue and let the reds and yellows dominate the sky and slightly darken the right side – just a tad. But in any case, it’s an amazing picture.
Really nice! I agree with the comments above. If the highlights are difficult to improve in the original, you could also just clone in the areas with no detail.
Thanks for the comments and suggestions everyone. I took another crack at editing it and tried to recover a bit more of the details in the clouds and used @John_Williams idea to clone in a bit of detail in the most blown out part of the clouds. I also used two color fill layers at very low opacity to try to get rid of the kind of burnt look on the horizon on the right as well as to add some color to the blown out whites. As I almost started from scratch (kept the original lightroom at edit) the look of the whole image is a bit different , I cooled down the left side while warmed the right side a bit to try to enhance the golden lighting of the sun. I’ve attached my re-edited image as well as jpeg of the raw photo with no edits for reference. I think I recovered the highlights just about as best as I could but you can make the judgement from the raw photo. I hope to get another shot at shooting conditions like this again but I may have to wait a while as they are quite rare for my area.
