Hi Judy... welcome to Image Doctor online! It is good to see someone going to the beach and looking beyond the typical beach type scenery. These rocks have a nice mix of tones and textures and the seaweed helps to just add some additional interest. While this is a good starting point though... there are a few things we can do to improve this image.
The first thing I would like to do is crop the image just slightly... you can afford to take 10 percent from both the left and the right sides of the image and this should make is look a stronger composition.
Now the next task is to manage the tones in the photo. If you have a look at the histogram for this image you will see that the image looks rather flat... all the tones are bunched to the left end of the graph and there are no bright tones anywhere. What we need to do here is brighten the image a little; there are two or three ways this can be done. The simplest is to create a Curves adjustment layer and then move in the small white triangle on the bottom of this graph inwards so that you begin to brighten the image. Worth noting in the curves option is that you can add another point anywhere on this line and then gently bend the line outwards slightly.... if you move the lower section of the line outwards you will increase the contrast in the shadows and add more life to the sea weed.
Having done this, I would now sharpen the image a little... go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and in this dialogue select Amount - 120, Pixels - 2.8 and Threshold - 0. This will add a little more crispness to the overall print.
Finally, I would add a vignette to the image, just for the sake of darkening off the edges slightly and helping to maintain viewer focus nearer to the centre of this photograph. The simple way to do this is in Photoshop... use the Elliptical Marquee tool and set the Feather option to 250 pixels and then draw a big circle within the boundaries of the image area. Now invert this selection (Select > Inverse) and then add a Brightness Contrast Adjustment layer and pull back the brightness to -40. Simple!
Working with Adjustment Layers means that you can turn each adjustment on and off to see what each effect is doing, and it is also good for adjusting the adjustment at any time if you think you want to change something. You can also save an image with these Adjustment Layers in place as a Photoshop Document (PSD) file and go back to it in a few weeks time for the sake of tweaking things. To save this image as a JPEG again though you will need to Flatten the Image (Layer > Flatten Image).
Now, the next time you make an image like this, give some though to making use of depth-of-field. Depth-of-field describes how much foreground and background is in focus either side of the main point where you focused and it is controlled by the cameras aperture. The bigger the aperture number the smaller the aperture and the more you can get in focus. As an example f5.6 is a moderately open aperture and so less foreground and background is in focus... by comparison though, f16 is a smaller aperture and so it brings the foreground and background more into focus.
Looking at the EXIF data attached to this photo, I can tell the shutter speed was 1/125th of a second while the aperture was at f5.6 and your ISO was 140.
To improve on an image like this I would be putting the camera onto Aperture Priority Mode (A) on your cameras exposure control and then I would be choosing f16 on the camera setting. Now here is the important part... as you close down the aperture you are letting less light into the camera and you need to compensate for this in one of three different ways. One option would be to increase the amount of light on the scene.. given that most of use do not have control of the sunlight though, or if we did wait for it to get brighter then we might actually loose out on this quality of light. The other options though are to slow down our shutter speed to let more light in... and the other is to increase our ISO so that the sensor actually requires less light to make the same photo.
Personally... in the same situation I would be going to the A setting and selecting f16 to ensure that i had good focus all the way across those stones... I would be increasing my ISO setting to 400 ISO and then I would also be bringing my shutter speed down to about a 1/40th of a second. Because you have a VR lens you can actually hand hold the camera at this shutter speed but then again... I would be using a tripod if you are going to make images like this on a regular basis. Simple word of advice here.... if you are getting a tripod for this sort of photography, spend the extra dollars to buy one that is moderately robust but also versatile.
cheers, Image Doctor
Rocks and Seaweed - Image Doctor's edited version
