Whats wrong with this picture?

Something is off here. What is it? Strobe positioning?

- Subject Description: Grunts

- Location: Key Largo

- Equipment Used: EFs 18-55

- Post Processing Description (optional): Levels, Curves, hue&saturation, High-Pass sharpening

What do you think is wrong with it? Need more input. What is it you don't like about it?

The strobe aiming is center cut. Notice that the grunts on the extreme left and right are slightly less exposed than the center grunts. A diffuser would have evened the exposure out a little, but having shiny subjects across the entire frame makes it hard to evenly light with one strobe.

Nothing else in the frame is within strobe lighting distance.

What do you think is wrong with it? Need more input. What is it you don't like about it?

I dont know what I dont like about it, it just dosent make me say wow, like many of the pictures I see here. (oops! guests were allowed to post in this new forum. that has been fixed now. -eric)

ThebBackground looks artificial. Probably overdoing the corrections in PS.

Try to mask off thebackground and do not so much correction there.

Simon

Hmm, hard to say but I agree that something is wirng.

My two cents:

- shoot from an (slightly) downward angel

- the grunts are to near

- the scenary is deep but none the less looks flat to me

- the different colours of the same species looks "strange"

But I think you couldn´t have made much better on this subject...

Try to provide more information on how you shot i.e. aperture, shutter, strobe power. Also, are you using automatic adjustments or manual? It would be good to know this.

The image is very contrasty, saturated and perhaps a little lacking in green (according to my monitor). I like the color pretty well, though. The immediate background is pretty dark, the lighting uneven and the composition (slightly shooting down) detracts. Too much of the background contains uninteresting coral. I agree with others that you did fine with this subject in this location. You need to concentrate on shooting the same subject from a different perspective, lower and with more background interest. I like the blueness of the water but you need to be careful not to saturate it too much or else it appears "neon".

There's not a lot that's terribly wrong with your shot, it's just not a great shot. The background is uninteresting so you needed to fill more of the frame with the schooling grunts. The random positioning of the fish is also distracting as well as the uneven strobe fill.

Small schools of grunts, like these, are difficult subjects. The fish have to flow just right for the composition to work. Keep working it.

Larry

I agree w/ Larry about the grunts. They can look super-cool if they are all swimming at you or away from something in a "starburst" pattern. But these ones are swimming every which-way and it's distracting.

I also think the background looks un-naturally blue like Craig described.

Cheers

James

My opinion,

1. Its just not a wow photo .. grunts in wide angle arent a wow fish, and arent normally in a wow situation.

2. This particualr shot would be more interesting if shot more upwards to create a gradient blue

3. Post processing seems to have gone a bit too far, show us the original, as this one does have fake looking colours and contrasts.

4. Diffuser always helps with reflective fish, as does not shooting flat at them (i.e. shoot upwards and you can expose easier with a flash as the bounce doesnt come back at yo so much)

5. It seems too busy, a little messy i.e. the fish were just there, if you wait with grunt they do polarise into formation which always looks more organised and hence less confusing to look at. for example .. in this photo i find myself trying to pick out a subject fish, where as if they are all facing the same direction the entire school is the focus or subject.

basically very similar to what everyone else says.

Giles

The origional

http://www.umsis.miami.edu/~wheaton/CRW_5801.CRW

Camera settings

34mm, 1/80, F/14, ISO 200, Strobe full power

Canon File viewer utility

White ballance - white point = the rock in the center.

Photoshop

Levels I used auto as a starting point and then turned down the green and up red and blue.

Then hue/saturation. Cyan hue -> blue Cyan saturation up, lightness down.

Curves. choped of the top to cut out the reflections on some of the grunts

Sharpen

Erased particals in the water.

This time - much less saturation of Cyan among other things(but no partical removal) - Better?? I think so but still not WOW.

William,

I managed to get some more details/structures out of it but you wont get a wow pic out of it. The subject simply wasn't WOW...

William,

I managed to get some more details/structures out of it but you wont get a wow pic out of it. The subject simply wasn't WOW...

I agree it's better, What did you do to it?

So lessions learned so maby tommorow I can do better?

1. Find better looking fish.

2. Diffuser for shiny fish.

3. Schools need to be organized.

4. Do what ever it is that mexwell did in photoshop.

Hi William,

oh oh, it was late last night... :-)

I played around with mostly all of the RAW Converter settings trying to get a "natural" whitebalance and then (what I think made the difference) improved "shadows/highlights" which is a new function in PS CS.

By sliding the tonal curves I corrected the colours to please my eye. Sorry, I can´t give you the specific parameters because I did not save the RAW file. I will remeber to do for the next time...

Sorry!