Today was the day I sent emails without their attachments and took my camera out with drained battery. So I had to make do with the phone for this shot of the gulls enjoying new walking territory on the icy boating lake.
This image has lots of potential! You mentioned not knowing too much about RAW. If this is shot in RAW it looks a bit rubbish on the back of your camera and not too good on the computer, but all the information is there on the memory card rather like on negatives in the 'old days'! You then need to process the image. In the old days if it was monochrome (B&W) you would have to process the developed negative & print in the darkroom. With digital technology we use computers and the industry standard is Adobe Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) and Adobe Lightroom. You can 'develop' colour images into monochrome by either channel swapping (basically moving the reds, greens blues around) until you get a more punchy image. If you just change to grayscale you miss lots of creativity to make the picture zing. If you shoot in jPeg (the normal for point and shoot cameras and mobile phone cameras, the camera has already decided what the image should look like and in the process much of the detail has been removed! Your camera may not shoot RAW, in which case remember the next camera you buy make sure it does! Now looking at this image it looks good as it is, but just try cropping to a letter box shape removing the foreground and see if it is stronger! The foreground doesn't add to the image in my opinion! I hope you find that helpful?
@marshwader thank you for your time and trouble. You are right, my camera doesn't have the RAW option. When I am confident with using it out of auto I will think about upgrading. I have done the crop you suggested and instead of just monochrome, just reduced the vibrance until I was happy with the amount of colour left. The light on the ice gives it the shape that I thought the foreground was there for. Thank you - it was worth a revisit!
January 30th, 2016
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