took my air 3 out to the coast last weekend, conditions were pretty good, wind was manageable, and i came back with like 200 photos and maybe 3 that i actually liked. which feels like a terrible ratio after driving 2 hours to get there.

i think part of it is i dont really know what im looking for compositionally when im up there? on land i can kind of read the scene but over water everything starts to look samey after a while. tried doing the classic waves-meeting-rocks type shot and some abstract water texture stuff from high up but nothing really grabbed me when i got home and looked at them on the big screen.

the editing was also weirdly hard, the colors of the water kept looking either too teal or just grey and dull depending on what i did. is there some trick to coastal editing im missing or is it just a practice thing

coastline stuff is genuinely tricky and i think a lot of people underestimate it. the sameyness problem you're describing is real ? water is water and without something to anchor the eye it just becomes texture. what made a big difference for me was actively hunting for leading lines, like where a beach curves, or a pier, or where different water colors meet because of depth changes or currents. flying along the edge of something rather than hovering over open water almost always gives you more to work with.

for the colur editing ? are you shooting raw? if not that's probably your main problem because jpeg at the coast is really unforgiving with that blue-teal range. in raw you can selectively target the blues and aquas and shift them independantly which gives you way more control. i usually push the aqua hue slightly toward blue and then lift the luminance on it a bit and that usually gets me closer to how it actually looked.

also timing matters way more at the coast than inland i think. overcast flat light makes water look dead but that low angle morning light where you get shadows in the wave textures is incredible. worth the early alarm.

3 keepers out of 200 is honestly not that bad for a first proper coastal shoot, i came back with basically nothing useful my first time. you kind of have to learn to read the water from altitude which just takes time hovering and looking before you start shooting. i started setting a rule for myself where i spend the first 10 minutes just flying around and not taking a single photo, just seeing what's interesting, and my hit rate got a lot better after that.