Lynne,
FUN is a great fun snap shot of what was obviously a great evening
VOLUME is an excellent execution of quite a hard thing to shot well
Your sky and ground are both well exposed, with no blown patches in the sky, or dull dark patches in the foreground.
This is a great spring board to just fine tune a bit. IMHO the foreground needs a very slight selective boost to the exposure, but holding back on the blacks, to add a little contrast to the time marks in the banks. A simple curves adjustment on the foreground should do it.
Now Ive just had a nose at your EXIF data, and you may wish to consider a few points for future shoots. A landscape generally does not need a very fast shutter speed. Your ISO is very very high at 1600 ISO, and your shutter speed is fast at 1/500 of a second. If you half your iso to 800ISO you need to double the amount of light needed to maintain the same exposure, so you could have used a 1/250th of a second shutter speed. At 18mm focal length this would not have produced any camera shake. In fact an ISO of 100 would give you a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second, still fairly good for 18mm focal length. This would give you a much cleaner image without the noise artefacts that come with high ISOs.
My only minor area for future improvement would be the inclusion of some foreground interest, but you did very well with this shot.
Kind rgds
Adie
So , a teeny weeny bit squiffy , no idea about settings & hand held with only the pool lighting...can't remember if I triggered the on camera flash :shrug:
