A ride through the Peak District

I went out with a friend on the bikes today to take some photos, I think he’d been inspired by some of the river shots I did recently and wanted to have a go at them. The day was pretty overcast so we didn’t have hard light coming through the leaves and as it was pretty shaded we had some fairly lengthy shutter speeds to work with to get the movement in the water. I didn’t get much at the river so we drove on.

Tree in the Peak district with rocks in the foreground with the sun hitting them through a break in the cloud

We stopped quickly to get this tree shot as I can’t resist lone trees and the rocks made a good leading line to the subject (spotted by my friend, credit where it’s due). The sky wasn’t up to much and the light was pretty flat so I wanted to try and give the impression of the sun breaking the clouds and hitting the rocks in the foreground. This effect was achieved through an off camera flash with a CTO gel off to the left. A photographer named Joe McNally does this type of shot quite a bit and his books explaining the ins and out of it are great if you are interested, there’s always strobist too which is pretty much the Mecca of off camera flash. The shot here was taken at ISO100, 19mm, f/16 at 1/50, underexposed slightly to emphasise the lit part. I thought it had a bit of a resemblance with one of my first shots I took with my 5D of top withens near Haworth (this one).