Early Light

These are a few photos I took while walking around the top deck of a cruise ship after breakfast. The light was fascinating for me.

I shot raw and processed them using Photoshop Elements + Elements XXL plugin.

I prefer the first image. It has a dark and moody feel. I also like the off centered composition. Finally the bright area in the sky results in a natural vignette. You may have enhanced that as well, but it works. The framing holds the viewer's attention in the center portions of the image.

As I mentioned I like the dark and moody feel, but it seems a tad too dark. That might be my monitor which is calibrated for printing with the brightness turned down to about 80 c/mm.

The second and third images seem to have potential for improvement. As currently processed the God's rays are washed out and could benefit my greater emphasis and contrast. If global adjustments don't seem to help, you might want to consider a manual approach using dodge and burn to increase the impact of the rays.

The interplay between sky and sea is always fun to photograph and worth getting up early for the best show. They are all good captures. The second has more appeal for me because there is more interaction between the two as the sun lays down a golden path across the water for the eye to follow, rewarded by a patch of pure gold floating in the distance. I agree with camperjimk that there is potential for extracting some more drama from the rays in that one (and in the third entry) using general or localized editing tools to tinker with contrast, clarity, etc. Rays such as this are gifts, like rainbows, that sometimes don't appear quite as impressive in photos as they do in real life, and I don't mind enhancing them when I can. But that's the photographer's choice to do or not.

I agree with both commenters before me: Very good captures of the beautiful light and reflections.

I feel like the first one is the most interesting because of the composition, I would brighten up the dark areas a little bit though, if that's possible. I also like the awesome bright light on the water surface in the second one - makes it special. I feel like it could benefit from a slight crop to get the reflection of the sun either completely centered or slightly more off, like in the first one.

Yes, at first I thought the first one might be a bit dark as well but the 3 images on my screen are pretty much what I saw at the time from memory. My screen is calibrated to 90 cd/m2.

With all my landscape, seascape, sunset and sunrise photos I always create a documentary version first and then experiment with colour grading to try to create artistic versions for images where it might work. All these image have potential for artistic versions.

Below is the first one again with it lightened up a bit using a Curves Adjustment layer but I wouldn't lighten it up more than this.

Thank you @minniev.

These are pretty much as I saw them at the time. With these types of photos (sunrises, sunsets) you can really let your imagine run wild to a large extent to create enhance/artistic versions and I definitely will with at least some of them.

Yes, that is exactly what got my attention as well and so took a few quick shots before it disappeared.

That is a good suggestion. Though to centre it would mean cropping off the sun's rays on the right which I definitely would not want to do, so I tried cropping a bit off the left to move the sun's reflection more off-centre. Something like this -

This crop is slowly growing on me 🙂

I didn't like what I saw on bringing these pictures up with the thread -- to dark and flat .. But clicking on them and looking at the enlarged view I do like the light that see and nice pictures ... A problem with this site ... need to look at all entries in the enlarged view

WhyNot

Thank you WhyNot.

I'm not sure what is going on with the site generated thumbnails.
Yes, there is a difference between them and the fullsize but on my screen the difference is negligible.

I don't see any difference. Perhaps the perceive difference is due to the different backgrounds, bright for the thumb and black for the full sized image.

Admin did an update since your post and now I don't see any difference between the thumbnail and fullsize as well.