Campfire - any post production advice?

[H.S.Fotehog]

New to the forums and new to photography, but love 'em BOTH! This place is AWESOME.

I'm mostly happy with the composition of this shot, but curious what I could do to make it look better post-production? What I would like is to maybe make the rock more obviously silhouetted against the sky and possibly enhance the color of the fire to be more orange. I know there is no way to take the blur out of my 3 subjects as it was a 30s exposure. Any advice or critique is welcome! Thanks!!

Oh ya - I have Photoshop CS4 but it's a STEEP learning curve! Kind of overwhelmed by it so HELP PLZ!

~H.S.

Camera: Nikon D40
Lens: Nikon 18-200mm @ 18mm
Aperature: f3.5
Exposure: 30s
ISO: 1600

(It was a moonless night.)

[mmyers29]

You tube is the best way to learn how to use photoshop, that and just using it. Bring a picture up and just starting messing with it. There are some really great tutorials on you tube that will help you figure some of the more popular tools out. Type in: photoshop cs4 (then whatever tool or function you want to learn about) - they normally have step by step instructions.

the photo is great. I would like to see a bigger version of it though; the one attached is a bit small and hard to make out a lot of its details. But from what I can tell, its look really awesome.

[H.S.Fotehog]

Wow! YouTube? Really? I would have never thought of that! I rarely look at that site - just thought it was a dumping ground for mostly useless vids..... haha I'll check it out though for sure! I just assumed you had to pay for all the video tutorials like Lynda.com, et al.

As far as picture size, I'm not really sure how to make it bigger. All the forum rules say to limit the size to 740 pix on the longest side. I posted this image on my Smugmug site at that resolution then linked to it. Is there a better way? I have noticed that a lot of other people have images imbedded in their messages that are quite a lot bigger. I'll try downloading directly to this message....

Thanks for the input!

~H.S.

[mmyers29]

Yeah, seriously, youtube. Its where I've gotten some of my greatest tips. You can find all kinds of things on youtube.. It can be helpful when you need it to be.

The place that I use to imbed my photos to here is flickr through yahoo. They come out on here really nicely... here is my flickr page so you can get an idea, just in case you've never heard it.

Flickr: Mmyers2010's Photostream

hope this helps. and again-- Really nice photo.