2009-08-20

Oyster Bar at Gibsons

2 comments:

Ken Bryant said...

Lovely toning! Nice blacks!

Consider cropping out the very bottom reflections, so the bottom edge of the photo is "in the black". Anything that bright at the edge of the frame has a tendency to become too prominent (in traditional terminology it "leads us out of the frame", though I'm not sure that's what really happens). In this case the problem is increased because the bottom edge is, the brain knows, "closest to us" in depth, so we give those rather minor reflections more attention than they deserve.

The other thing that helps, if you don't want to crop the reflection, is to do an exposure gradient at the bottom (in lightroom or photoshop). It's the same effect as a vignette, except in this case it's fading in from the bottom, instead of from the corner.

J. Evan Kreider said...

Thanks! I think I will try both approaches and see which I prefer. I took the shot solely because of the reflections, then fussed over cropping the top and sides of the picture but not the bottom. I wanted to keep five horizontals of windows, hoping that would help the photo's balance. Now I'll try the gradient solution (after doing a bit more reading on how).