The flock of ducks was just coming in for a landing on the only open water available. From the spot I was in, I just had a couple of quick shots to try and get them in flight.
Post processing with PSP9 included, on a background copy, clone out the overhead power lines through the sky; select the sky from the horizon up and apply adjustment layers hsl burn at 82%, levels to add more contrast to the clouds. Invert selection and with adjestment layer increase constrast on bottom of shot.
Take this shot for an example of what I was talking about.
One exposure for the sky and water, one for the land. I layerd them, and erased the parts of the sky exposure to get the land to show through. tip - use the eraser at about 25% opacity at the edges, to make it look more natural.
There's also some heavey hue/sat neat image, and other stuff going on there, I was going for a Rikki look ;-)
I think, considering the time of day that you took this, that you did a wonderful job pre, and post shot.
You might consider using a graduated ND filter, I love my cokin filter, adapter rings let me use all the filters on any lens. Looks from the titl that you had to alter the top to ge it to be where you wanted it.
Another approach is to use a tripod, and then take two exposure about 4-5 stops apart, preferrably with the same f/
very nice overall, one could only wish for a sunset in this exact same setup.
These scenes are almost always better with softer light, which happens +/- 90 minutes on either side of the sun/horizon events. In the middle of the day you will need to contend with harsh light and washed out colors, although a faster shutter speed will allow capture of flocks of birds in some detail, as you have demonstrated in this image. I strongly feel that flocks of birds, or individual birds, often look like a "mistake" unless there is some bird detail showing. I usually prefer the birds (and jet contrails, and cars, and people, and trash from MacDonald's) move through the scene before I expose the image.
I should add that the dynamic range of this scene is a bit too wide, with loss of detail in the dark shadows and loss of detail in the bright portions of the sky. At this point in time, cameras cannot capture what the eye can see in the middle of the day. Until the technology allows captures of big dynamic ranges, we all should confine our landscape photography to times of smaller dynamic ranges in the scenery.
Very cool effect on the clouds, they have an ethereal feel to them. I'm 50/50 on the overall composition, my eye keeps coming down to the boat but really wants to explore the scene above - competing elements (at least for me).
I did some scroll-cropping in my browser window and like two crops: one just below (or at) the mid-distance weeds (emphasis on boat here) -and- one just above the boat (ie- photo sans boat) emphasising the scene.
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