wow, it is a lot harder than it looks!! help!

Ok, I got up early (for me!) to try some hdr stuff after looking at the foum all night thinking how cool it was.
This is my very first attempt and I'd like to know why it just looks weird to me. This was the most realistic I could get it, but I know it's just not right. The rocks in the foreground are actually fairly realistic in the coulour, if just a tad over saturated in my version. The red sandstone is very strong around the area.

Did I mess up on the shutter speed as I was playing around trying to slow it down to blur the water. They were shot at between .8 and 2.5 sec @ F32 with a cp (cp used only to lose a bit of light, don't have a ND yet) that explains the blurry look at least, as I only had a rock to rest it on and didn't take advantage of using the timer to remove any shaking from me.

The sun had just come up over the horizon.

Take a look at the cropped shot and see those horrible artifacts on the water? what's that all about?

basically I'd like opinions on what's wrong with the result, and what I could do differently to get the desired high range, but a more natural feel

I'm already thinking of a more normal shutter speed with no filter would be a start!

Edit: oh, and what's the best way to remove the horrible curve in the horizons thanks to my 17-85 IS. using photoshop CS2

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What program were you using to create these? You picked one of the toughest HDR scenes out there - smashing waves make it very difficult for any program to line them up correctly. Photomatix has an option to deal with these kind of situations, but even then it doesn't get it right 100% of the time and some ghosting will be visible.

Ha, yes, I never seem to start with the easy subjects first!

I used photomatrix to do this with the "water" option selected. I tried CS2 but no dice (not with my hdr skills anyway)

I can deal with the ghosting water in this particular shot, and i'll put that down to experience, I wasn't even thinking of the waves moving, prob the sleep depravation this place is giving me lately! I actually went down to the beach to get some sunup shots in HDR,( you're prob going to say that's the second hardest one to do!) but I'm still working on them at the moment, and once again, it's back to the drawing board......

In the crop shot I'm more worried about the fake grey bits going on there if anyone can shed some light.......(no pun intended)

Those grey bits in the waves could've probably been avoided if you used .tiff instead of .jpeg when you merged them. Also, look up a program called photomatix, from my experience, its much better for HDR mergers.

yep, used photomatix, and .tiff

Hmm, did you resize the images or reduce the image quality any before entering it into photomatix? All you did was make them .tiff right?

Yes.
Converted from large Raw (50D) via DPP (no mods bar #3 on sharpen) into 16 bit tiffs, then straight into photomatix, then out as it's default tiff format, then into PS for a crop and final PP.

The funny thing is I am getting the same effects with the sunrise shot, and in this shot it's only where the cloud has (I think) either moved in between shots, and as the sun is blasting through that thin layer of the end of the cloud, it has overexposed in all of the shots at this point. I'll stick up an example soon to show you, but I just got back from taking shots of my niece at netball and she wants me to send them to her ASAP.
Cant keep my goddaughter waiting!!

The gray patches are the water's movement. This is normal when shooting waves. When you shoot multiple shots of waves, obviously the water is going to look different in each shot. When they stack up in HDR, you get those patches.

The solution? Well, this is the 3rd time I'm suggesting this in as many days. You need to take one of the originals, ie. the one with the water exposed best, and layer it underneath your HDR shot. Create a mask on the HDR and paint out the gray patches so the water from the original shows through. You may need to do some cloning to touch things up as well.

Cheers Jtwin, I'll give that a try.