A couple weekends ago my mother-in-law was in town to help Jess around the house and with Logan, so I had some more flexibility than usual for photography. To take advantage of the situation, I rented my current dream lens, the EF-S 10-22mm, for the weekend.
The lens was great--very sharp, and I really appreciated the extra wide field of view.
I'm excited with the results from this outing, though not necessarily about the images themselves. There wasn't any color in the sky, so the images are missing that drama that I love. I'm excited, though, because I think I
finally nailed the exposure in terms of balancing the foreground and the sky while still getting the water effect that I was after. Now I just need to wait for a dramatic sunrise or sunset to come along, and I should be golden!
The original, unedited
image.
Also, here are some more details / notes that I posted in the comments:
A couple notes on the exposure:
- I shot in full manual
- I zoomed in on the rock and metered off of the foreground, which ended up being about +2 stops overexposed for the whole scene.
- I experimented with different shutter speeds, from about 1/4sec to maybe 1sec.
- I occasionally took a 0ev exposure to capture the sky in case I wanted to blend it in. Turned out to be unnecessary in this case; I just used a virtual grad filter in Lightroom to bring down the exposure of the sky.
- I shot in RAW, then I sent the saturation through the roof in Lightroom.
Finally, I picked a rock that was mostly out of the water, waited for a wave to hit, and then started the exposure just about as the water hit the rock. I experimented with starting the exposure at different points there, too. You can never really predict what the water's going to do or what it will look like, so experimentation seems key :)
