Tuesday 24 August 2010

An Interesting Failure

We were out on the Rideau Canal today; I took, I think, 84 shots in total.  I got a couple of good ones, of which more later, but this one is amusing.  We were heading home up the Rideau River, about 4:pm, and going fairly fast.  I had the camera set on auto, no flash, and I had only one instant to get this shot.

Here is what I got.
Sigh.  Overexposed, horizon madly off and the extreme telephoto making the focus pretty shaky, given that I did not have time to let the camera identify a target.

I've played with the shot, because I love the V of ripples.  Here's my best edit.

033/365.

The thoughts I still have about it are these: should I crop out the overexposed shoreline; should I play with the contrast; and, last but not least, should I just throw the dern thing out.

Thursday Evening

This is a cropped edit I received from Anvilcloud, who is one humdinger of a photo editor.  He advises darkening the white reflections, but even without that the improvement is great.  As he has revised it, I think it's a save.  Thanks, AC! 

4 comments:

  1. I take so many shots like this: I can see the moment but I can't get the camera to respond in time. It's so frustrating. I can see why you would want to edit out the shore line but I'm not sure that's where the main issue is. The duck and its V need to be the focal point but they begin in the darkest part of the river. B/c of this the bands of reflection seem to be winning out in capturing the viewer's attention. Dangnabbit.

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  2. I would like to keep the paddler in there, so I would do a perspective crop. I would darken the whole pic a bit and the top part even more. Then I would desaturate the top part a bit. Maybe I can email you my result. I think I have your email.

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  3. Very interesting. I do find I learn more from my failures than my successes.

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