Sunday Final

Happy Easter.
I ate a lot.
I also took a lot of pictures.
All of them bad.
Okay, not really.
I took some baby pictures that look okay, the rest, the artsy stuff was bad.
After I ate a lot, I figured I shouldn't just go home and sleep, though lemme tell you, I was tempted.
To go to sleep I mean.
Instead I headed back to Sand Island, you know, from yesterday, to try my luck at getting some nice images.
Luck.
I didn't have it.
As in this is harder than I thought.
First of all, I left the rocks alone.
I'll go back with some overhead light and have a go.
Instead since the sun was getting low, I thought I'd practice some long exposure water shots.
I practiced, but got nowhere near perfect.
So I started here:

I'm shooting into the sun, which is already a problem.
So now I filter up and slow the shutter down, like way down, like 10-20 seconds down.
I was trying to catch the waves breaking over those sand retention thingys, so timing is everything.
I don't have it.
Timing, I mean:

Too long.
I need to time the water going over, and then going back out.
I also stacked some filters and got a mean purple thing.
Light was also leaking in from somewhere even though I wrapped the lens with a black cloth.
I need to work on this.
Then I shot short:

Fail.
Still not getting the timing right:

I'm sad.
It wasn't a total loss though as I got a couple of nice shots:

I got this dude fishing right before I left.
I've also been fooling with some High Dynamic Range processing:

I downloaded a trial version of the stuff from Nik and it's working out okay.
I think.
More on this later.
Overall though, I feel like I wasted two hours.
Then again, two hours at the beach is not really wasted.
If you know what I mean.
Maybe I should stick to baby pictures.
Or something.