Runners up for assignment 2

I have to comment about the dog. He was so sweet and you could tell he was just soaking in the breeze and the sight and smell of the waves. I thought about titling this photo "Waiting" because there were a bunch of surfers in the water and it looked as if he might be waiting for his owner. :-) My husband took a photo of me crouched down with him watching the waves that is an even better photo, but alas, I'm only in it, I didn't take it.

I like the way you see how hard the guys in the canoe are working and the breaking wave in the foreground.

I decided against this because I didn't have the whole piece of driftwood in the frame.

I decided against this one because it is heavily cropped and processed, which affected the image quality.

I love the tree and the way it leans into the frame.

Loved the contrasts in this with the green vegetation and the red and black rock against the blue of the water and the sky.

Just a well framed waterfall is what I thought, nothing spectacular.

Assignment 2 ~ Island Dusk

This is my final submission for Assignment #2. (I didn't take into account the order readers would see them, so this looks like the first, oops!) It is another sunset photo. I chose a low aperture setting (f/6.3) in order to have the sand and wave in the foreground in focus. It was getting pretty dark so I used a shutter speed of 1/6 sec. and under exposed the image a couple of stops in order for the land and trees in the foreground to be more of a silhouette. I framed it in portrait to capture both beach and sky and I deliberately framed it so the angle of the water would lead the eye toward the back of the photo at a diagonal. I think this works because the land, mountain and the layers of clouds are all horizontal and framing it with the waves horizontal would have made the image seem blocky. The image is not cropped and was processed in Lightroom.

Assignment 2 ~ Fire & Water

I photographed as many sunsets as I was able to, partly because they are so beautiful and partly because I am fascinated with capturing a spectacular green flash. With the clouds on the horizon there was no green flash on this evening (they couldn't be seen until the sun fell behind them), but they clouds themselves added such a great element to the images. They made it look to me, as the title of the photo suggests, like a fire burning in the distance on the horizon. I used my telephoto lens, which I usually use at least for some of the photos I take of sunsets in order to put as much emphasis on the sun as it is setting and to get the best images of green and/or blue flashes if they occur. I experimented a lot on this trip with shooting in either aperture or shutter priority and in particular I experimented with using as high an aperture value as possible while still keeping my shutter speeds as high as they need to be because I shoot the last moments of the sun falling below the horizon in continuous shooting mode. Because the shutter speeds are falling continuously I always use a tripod, as I did here, because I am unable to hold the camera still for long enough. This photo was shoot in aperture priority mode at f/8, 1/125 sec at 300 mm. This photo was cropped to put as much emphasis on the image where the sun is at the horizon instead of the entire sky. It was processed in Lightroom.

Assignment 2 submission - Hana Trees

This photo was taken on a sunny day while we were driving to Hana on Maui. The trees are beautiful with their colorful bark and they are extremely tall. I again chose my 18 - 55 mm lens because I wanted to get as much of the trees in the image as possible. I chose to use a portrait orientation to capture the height of the trees. There was a row of them and I framed them from close to one of the trees looking past toward the others so they would look a little like a row of columns. This photo has been cropped to remove elements that distracted from the look I was going for ~ a little brush from behind the first tree and another overhanging branch from the top that I felt made the photo too busy. It was processed in Lightroom.

Assignment 2 Haleakala Morning

I just returned to Alaska from 2 weeks on Maui and took 1000's of pictures. Many of them are of whales I took with my camera in continuous shooting mode, but even subtracting them I still took 1000's. Much thanks to my very patient husband for letting me take as many photos as my batteries and memory cards would allow! He also did everything in his power to get my computer fixed when I damaged my power jack by kicking the cord. Even after what we hoped was a quick fix he patiently endured my not so silent frustration and tears as my computer then started shooting sparks (the ultimate reason my assignment is late) and I inadvertently erased from my memory card the best pictures I have ever taken of a sunset.....before I had saved them to my hard drive.  This is the first of the four photos I'm submitting. There were 11 finalist that the four were selected from. I will follow this post with the semi-finalists.

This photo, Haleakala Morning, was taken early in the morning. My husband and I left our room at 3:30 am in the hopes of witnessing one of the spectacular sunrises that our seen from the summit of this volcano. Unfortunately, there were too many clouds to see the sunrise. The first choices I had to make concerning this, and all the photos I would take had to do with which lens to use. It was bitterly cold and windy and we were hiking a short distance at over 10,000 feet so I was only bringing my camera - no bag, no tripod. I choose my smallest lens, the 18-55 mm kit lens that came with my camera (I so want a good wide angle lens, but figure if I can't take a descent photo with the kit lenses, having better ones won't make that much difference.)  I chose this over my telephoto lens thinking that I could always crop my images if I wanted to, but whatever is out of the field of view in the telephoto is lost forever. The other reason I chose this lens is that I would be hand holding the camera and I have notoriously shaky hands; the telephoto is heavier and requires an even steadier hand, especially given that I would have to use even slower shutter speeds with it. The fact that this photo is in focus when I hand held the camera and used this shutter speed is a miracle. I chose to shoot with the aperture wide open to be able to use as fast a shutter speed as possible. This worked also to capture the foreground in focus. I chose this photo over others that don't include the foreground because I think foreground adds to the sense of depth the photo has. I had to punch everything up a bit  in Lightroom  because there is a lot of haze in the original image. It has not been cropped.