Latest learning is the unsharp masking. Because of the light on the day being poor, I had a set of very black rocks, with very light, white sea foam. Any tips on bringing the two together gratefully received.
Latest learning is the unsharp masking. Because of the light on the day being poor, I had a set of very black rocks, with very light, white sea foam. Any tips on bringing the two together gratefully received.
It looks like you still have some unused exposure on the spray, so I think you could have increased either the shutter opening or the ISO and that would have increased the shadow values, but this particular file's shadows are completely gone. If you shot this RAW, you may be able to increase the exposure values in software (or at least increase the shadows) and recover some detail.
Also, if you did shoot this RAW, you could have SLIGHTLY over-exposed the highlights and still recovered them later, while maybe retaining some detail in the dark background.
Now, as practice for balancing exposure while retaining details, this is fine, but on its own merits, there isn't a lot to like here. Personally, I would prefer to see the faces of the waves, or at least have the camera perpendicular to the wave action. The back of a wave is the least interesting part. And it goes without saying that the huge black mass at the top is a little distracting.
(Kind of unsure what this has to do with Unsharp Masking.)
The unsharp masking was me trying to get finer detail on the waves. I always shoot in raw so I will do some experimenting with the settings and see if it can be improved.