I always enjoy looking at light interacting with water textures, and I seem to make a lot of water abstracts when I’m in not classically beautiful places with not classically good light. This is my favorite water abstract to date because of the shapes, nice contrast, and evenness of the pattern across the frame.
Basically, it was in a shallow part of a lakeshore on a mostly cloudy and windy day. At one point the sun partially came out in a diffuse way from behind thin clouds while a pretty strong wind gust hit the water. The pictures are cool, but I really wish I could somehow share the experience of looking through the viewfinder and watching the shapes dances. That was really trippy and beautiful.
Specific Feedback Requested
Nothing specific! Does it resonate? Postprocessing suggestions?
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
ISO 1600, 300mm, f/22, 1/500 sec.
I don’t have a particularly new camera so I hit it pretty hard with noise reduction in Lightroom. I have a bad habit of taking shots with too narrow of a depth of field, so this time I used a small aperture and high ISO.
brentgoesoutsidephoto
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Very cool abstract, Brent. Excellent play on light and shape.
I like this, Brent. The high contrast gives the ripples the impression that they’re very deep.
You know I like water reflection images, so of course I like this one too! I like the variety of lines and shapes.
You don’t have to feel too bad about your use of noise reduction - it gives the water’s surface a glossiness that’s beneficial. If you choose not to apply too much NR, you’ll have some grain and that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. I recently printed one of mine that had grain and very little NR and I really liked it.
Keep up the water reflection shots - I’d like to see more.
Brent, I’m old enough to remember patterns like this on the television… 
This is a great take with the high contrast, lots of ripples and subtle shadows. In an image like this, where the water’s moving, getting similar sharpness across the frame is important, but “perfect” sharpness is not. Now all I have to do in connect the left edge through the maze to escape on the right. 
This is really cool Brent, the pattern is just mesmerizing. I agree with @Mark_Seaver, this does look like a maze that would take forever to get through, which increases my engagement with the image substantially.
I initially thought the image might benefit from a darkening of the darker tones. So I tried that via TK luminosity masks, and concluded that I prefer it as presented. However, the TK Darks Mask I used (think it was D2, essentially inverting the tones), produced an interesting B&W image in it’s own right. So I output a Mask to Pixels layer and bumped the contrast. Not better, just a different riff.
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Thanks everybody for taking a look! Hah, I like the idea of trying to get through a maze in this picture.
@Ed_McGuirk - I do the same thing all the time with the TK panel! Sometimes the masks themselves can make really cool images! I stubbornly still have no black and white images in my portfolio. I figure one of these years I’ll give it a try… seems like something the veterans always get into!
@Matt_Lancaster can I just post more images in this thread? I would feel way too selfish to create a new thread for all of my pictures. Here’s a couple more, just for you. Funnily enough @Mark_Seaver , the second one is titled “Visual Static”. I am just old enough that the first TV I remember had dials that “ca-chunk”'d loudly when turned through mostly static channels 
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Looks great! It is fun to watch the patterns through the viewfinder, and then be surprised by what is captured. And I love your gold and blue photo!
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Brent, I love the color version. For me at least there is a lot more to be lost in. Thanks for posting the additional images. Great stuff.
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Thanks for posting more images. That blue and gold one is great. The agitation of the surface is quite interesting.
My preferred framing is to zoom in to a scale that captures a couple of handfuls of ripples so the eye can wander gracefully. But I like the agitation of yours so I may try that, too.
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