It's a good image, Dave, and a great start for your first time out. I left my comments in the gallery, but will repeat them in more detail here. 1) the beam of light from the lighthouse is too solid. If you did that in Vue, you can play around with the transparency settings on whatever material you used. A non reflective tinted glass material would probably work very well there. If it was post production, a transparency layer might be the way to go with that. It would give you the basic outline, a bit of color, but would reduce the solidity. 2) the waves that the wind is whipping up are just too spiked. I presume these were made with the smudge tool. I would add just a bit of white (a few streaks that can be smudged into the gray) for a foamy look and then experiment with curls. Curl and feather and you can have some awesome waves. It's just a matter of practice. Those were the only two areas where I can offer helpful advice. The motion blur on the trees isn't quite right, but I'm not sure how to fix that. Maybe someone with more experience can give you some help on that one. Overall, I like this image. I can almost feel the wind. Kate