Hello all. I was passing through New Castle, NH (one of my favorite places on earth) and saw this scene developing in front of me. I pulled the mini-van over, with my wife and two boys in tow and spent a few minutes shooting. It was a brutal reminder that I need a graduated ND filter!

Here are two versions of the same shot. Some manipulation in Macromedia Fireworks. I do not know which one I prefer. Your input would be appreciated!

(I'm trying to keep up with some of you on the fancy border department)

<img src="http://www.ambiencemedia.com/pics/nc1.jpg">

<img src="http://www.ambiencemedia.com/pics/nc2.jpg">

Todd - I can tell that they are gorgeous photos, but the scanning seems blurry. Can you try it again and make it clearer? I'd love to see it.

It's hard to critique these at the their current size and resolution. My gut-level response is that I like #2 best, but if there was enough detail to move me through the middle-, fore-, and back-grounds in #1, that would be my choice. You are lucky to live in a pretty place tha you love.

Would you prefer larger resolution/size?

I like the uncropped version. Nice scene. It does seem to dark on my screen, and my screen is fairly bright. The image looks soft, in a good way. . .as if you added a soft focus. Has a romantic mood to it. Great shot. . . .nice border :) just a bit dark.

This is why I believe that a graduated ND filter would have helped a lot. I had a polarizer on, which I think in this case was a mistake. The original (see attached) is much darker and I made some curves adjustments in Fireworks to lighten things up. The more I lightened things up however, the more noise I get. I'm wondering if Photoshop CS would do a better job?

I did use layers with softening in the water so as to drown out some of the noise.

I did one the other day that I felt looked better and I can't duplicate the actions in Fireworks! Ugh.

If anyone wants to take a shot at manipulating this image to look better, I encourage it as we will all learn from it :)

I think I may need to get a calibrator too...

I was going to post a edited version of this shot but don't feel it would do much more than what you have done originally. What you have there looks good, just boost up the overall gamma slightly. when shooting into the sun or bright light , you should overexpose by a stop or so as the cameras meter will be fooled by the light and wind up underexposing which is what happened to your scene. Increase the soft focus layer as well as I think it adds nicely to this scene and will help cover up any degradation to the pic after more editing.

To me, all the good stuff in this photo in on the right side - the sun and rays, the ripples in the water in the foreground, the simple boats, the light. This is rather drastic, but I'd crop the left side off completely, changing it from landscape to portrait. The left side is rather dark and I don't care for the dark boat (?) because it is rather hard to make out and has cluttered lines/shape. I like your first version better than the 2nd version.

Spike