Hi James, this sort of photo makes me wish I had grown up near my
cousins in Bondi, rather than suffering the cold of New Zealand’s South
Island. Bondi is a great location and there are literally millions of great photos to be made there. That being said, it is always useful to think about cause and effect when you are making photos.
You mentioned that you used a 0.9 Graduated Neutral Density Filter when you were making this image but I feel the overall effect has been to make this scene look almost too dark and cold.
I would only be inclined to use grad filters now if I was shooting film; otherwise I shoot RAW and make the changes in post-production, darkening the sky in the RAW converter later.
Another thing to consider when making photos is your position relative to the subject. In this image there were two options you could have considered. First, by getting up really high you could have incorporated the shadows on the beach. Alternatively, if you had crouched down lower (the simpler option) you could have put these figures higher on the horizon.
Yet another option would be to zoom in with your 18-200mm lens so as to silhouette these surfers against the waves.
One last technical note; you made this photo at f/5 at 1/160s and 200 ISO. I would be inclined to use 400 or 800 ISO for the sake of using a smaller aperture. This will help you achieve better depth of field, which should make the image look a sharper.
Now, how to improve this image? Start by cropping the top and the bottom of it hard; that will get rid of that dead sky and also the awkward shadows on the sand. Now, the tricky part; I think the tones in this image are rather soft and if anything, they remind me of an old faded photo from the seventies. That’s why we are going to have some fun in the Curves panel.
When you open up the Curves panel you will see a straight line running diagonally across the graph. The top part of the line allows us to adjust the highlights, the bottom part allows us to adjust the shadows. Click the line near the bottom left corner (about a quarter of the way along the line and) and move the point right slightly. Do the opposite near the top of the line (about three-quarters of the way along the line) and drag the point slightly left. By creating a gentle S-curve we darken the shadows and lighten the highlights, and in so doing increase contrast.
Image Doctor's edited version
