The Calm Before

[Mr Yuck]

Almost cropped it to fit my widescreen LCD...but couldnt bring myself to lose the wave in the foreground or the dark sky

No PP in this shot...the straight horizon was pure luck, as i shot the picture from my brother's 17' aluminum skiff as he was powering back to the harbor.

F7.1 @ 1/1000 sec, automatic ISO because the manual controls on my brother's S2 IS dont seem to work for me...he's abused the heck out of it.

[readingr]

I like the idea behind this photo and especially the clouds.

The thing that spoils this photo for me is the glare off the sea. It seems to overpower the rest of the photograph.

The composition with the boats in the positions their in doesn't help the photo either. The right most needs to be further into the picture by a small amount or cropped out completely. As it stands it looks like a mistake that its there.

I also think it could be portrait rather than landscape.

Sorry for so much negativity but this really doesn't work for me.

Roger

[gahspidy]

I will agree with much of what Roger pointed out here. The glare is much, and the position/distance of the boat is such that I can only assume it is a boat because it is on the water. This was a tough shot to capture at this time of the day with the given lighting. You would need to use a polarizer to reduce the glare on the water, and zoom in a bit more on the boats if your intent was to capture the boats on the moody waters.

[Mr Yuck]

Here it is cropped


The glare was unavoidable, as glare is something I like to shoot I wanted to keep the darkness on the left and brighness on the right, kind of displays the dual personality of the sea.

Though I see your point about glare being excessive, if I had an S2IS of my own that worked perfectly, it would have had a filter on it, and to put a filter on my A510 would totally kill it's compact digital status...and it's also on its last legs due to abuse, the AE1, well...I think I have the filter for that, but it was not available at the time....it would have been the perfect camera for the day, but...*sings* you cant always get what you want

A tighter zoom on the boat would have been impossible considering we were moving about 15mph and I was pointing off to the side, our boat was hitting the waves sideways, and the "video viewfinder" of the S2IS is dang hard to see in that lighting for me. I would have been lucky to get the water in the frame.

On second thought, here's another taken about 2 seconds later, facing a little further to the right, cropped.

[readingr]

Now the new photo is much better and has just about the right amount of everything in view and I like how the waves lead to the boat and the helicopters? Clone them out and it would be a lovely tranquil photo.

This is the one to frame.

Roger

[gahspidy]

Yes, the second image you have posted is the better. The horizon is placed well, the boat over to the left, and the real subject here is the rolling waves and the not so overpowering reflections that they carry. There is still that light/dark mood that you desired to bring as well