Some critique please

Oly 4040 in pt-010, internal flash.

Took this shot on Pulau Weh, Indonesia. Going back this year, but with some lenses and a strobe.

I can see now that it looks much worse than before I made it smaller. Why is that? What size would you say is ideal for posting?

The actual ribbon eel is great and I know from experience getting a good shot can be very frustrating, so top marks.

I would have cropped the shot into a vertical rendition to remove the excess of the distracting coral rock and unimportant oposite.

What file size did you drop from?

I can see now that it looks much worse than before I made it smaller. Why is that? What size would you say is ideal for posting?

The size is fine. You just have to do some adjustments - use an unsharp mask to smooth it out and add some contrast and you will get back to a similar looking image.

Look for a coule of threads here on standard image processing steps. You can take a couple of minutes of time and be happy with the sized image.

And if it looks much, much worse after some effort, then you may want to reevaluate the original image - is it really THAT good. I know I have thrown a few out after sending some time on them.

Nice subject - tough to photograph. It would benefit from you being closer and maybe shot with a macro lens. Right now he is too small in the image - Cyber's comments on making it a vertical is good as well.

M

You need to get tighter on your subject. Find an auxillary lens that will let you do this. A strobe will definitely help. Remmeber one strobe can leave a harsh shadow so think of 2. The foreground is out of focus. Work with depth of field. Also once again getting tighter on your subject will help with this. Good exposuer on the eel and good composition of it.

The pose of the eel makes the shot. It looks like you got a bit of either out of focus problem or motion blur with the eel, which is a shame, cause the action of the eel is really really great.

I agree with the vertical crop, make the eel most of the image, than adjust it just a bit to bring it out. I tried, but I ended up oversharpening trying to get the blur out.

As I was too wound up to sleep following yesterdays incident in UK I did a similar thing to yourself... 500 cigarettes and three pairs of shoes later...

Thanks a lot everyone for the very constructive critique. I'll definately bring it with me on my next trip, along with a macro lens and a strobe (already ordered). I haven't really been working with cropping at all, which I guess is a shame.

The original size was HQ on the oly 4040, which is...about a meg.

I think on the original picture the eels head doesn't suffer from motion blur, but the downsizing gives the impression. This weekend I'll do some photoshoping and cropping and such and such, and will post some more pics after that.

This forum rocks!

Hi,

Our pleasure!

To obtain good printable image stock shoot in SHQ as there is little compression although writing time is a little slower.

Cheers,

Bob

I think I will next time. Actually on my last dive I used the SHQ setting, and the pictures were slightly better even on the monitor.