Four Trees

I was struggling for a decent composition this evening, probably because I spent most of it chatting to a fellow photographer when I should have been scouting out locations! Anyway I usually do lone trees but there wasn't really enough space between these to isolate one tree so I got a bunch of them against a fairly impressive sunset.

Lens flare was a bit of a problem as it always is when the sun is in shot but I got rid of most of it in post, I should have really removed the polariser as it was doing nothing facing the sun, it'd have been one less dirt and dust catching barrier between the scene and the sensor! I used a soft Lee 3 stop grad as the sky was a crucial part but I didn't want the land completely silhouetted. The exif stuff is ISO100, f/16 for 1/3 sec at 16mm although I am going to make a conscious effort to use a slightly narrower focal length in future, say 24ish mm, it's tough when I like to include so much sky!

Another Long Exposure Landscape

This is another one from the same shoot as my last post, the weather hasn’t been the best lately but I think it’s brightening up now so I will hopefully get out this week. Not vastly different from the shot I previously posted, this one is in portrait as I wanted to include a little more sky.
It was taken at ISO100, 21mm, f/8 30 seconds. I zoomed in a touch as I tend to get a little vignetting at 16mm when using a lot of filters. The flat water again comes from the 10 stop filter allowing for a 30 second exposure. I always try to shoot at ISO100 and had to use f/8 as that was the longest speed without going into bulb mode, I could have done 1 minute at f11 or 2 minutes at f16 plus, if I’d have gone to ISO50, this would have taken me to 4 minutes. Unfortunately I was getting hungry and the car park was closing!

Long lense if you don't feel like walking

I got this a few mornings ago and pretty much forgot about it until today. I wasn't dressed to brave the snow and I didn't really have time to get to a location so I got another view of my favorite tree! I had the 100-400 lense on, I think this one was about 230mm, I got a few with the tree isolated but wanted more of the great sunrise so I pulled back a little and used the tree and horizon to just set the sky. I didn't use any filters.
It was a bit tricky setting the white balance in the end I set it on the cooler side, about 4000K but desaturated the blues slightly. I added a bit of a vignette in photoshop and that's about it, there might be a few dust spots as I don't think I took care of them at the start.

Sky Library

I went out this morning to get what I thought would be a great sunrise and ended up sitting in the car for an hour as it started raining pretty hard and the sunrise didn't look too promising, the joys of landscape photography! I decided to come home and although the sunrise wasn't that great and there certainly wasn't much foreground interest to properly compose a photo I decided to add to the sky library. These are great to have on your system if you ever need to replace a dull looking sky from an otherwise ok shot. They can be taken whenever you see interesting sky. I have a few sun rises, sun sets, midday blue skies and some moody cloud shots. I don't do a great deal of composite sky shots but is handy just to have the option.

Farmers Field

As I haven't been out taking many landscapes of late I thought I'd see if I have anything in the back catalog and came up with this one. This is from a field near my house as the sun was going down. I probably didn't work on it as I have a decent number of tree shots and try to avoid adding to them, but they are just so damn photogenic. I have done a bit of HDR on this one in Dynamic Photo. The exif was ISO200, 126mm, 1/640, f4 don't ask why I didn't go to ISO100 and have 1/320 it's not like the cows are the fastest of movers!

Warm Sky

I took this earlier today as I was out expecting a good sunset but in the end it was just windy and a little too much cloud. I used a 3 stop ND grad, to balance the exposure, which I set to manual, 1/5sec f/16 24mm at ISO 100. I couldn't find much in the way of foreground interest but I wanted to make the clouds the focal point. I processed the RAW file in Lightroom and added a warm up filter in CS3.

Another Day, Another Silhouette

In an attempt to get another picture on the news I went and got this one this morning as I could see it was going to be a belting sunrise. This was taken in a field behind our house. I would have liked to get closer to the tree but the field was contained a few large bulls so I just put on a long lens. This was taken at f16 1/6 sec at 149mm, not a typical landscape focal length it has to be said. I also dialled in -0.3 exposure compensation to keep the land black.

A split toning RAW conversion

I seem to be putting a lot of tree shots up at the moment, no real reason other than they are a subject I enjoy shooting so here's another. The sunset was great last night but my location selection wasn't the best but as it was getting a bit late I didn't want to move. You really don't want to be driving along looking for locations whilst the sun is setting, especially on windy country roads hunched over the wheel, marvelling at the sunset, very dangerous. I wasn't overly happy with the shots I got so I really experimented with my RAW conversion until I found an effect I quite liked. If you do shoot in RAW I would recommend getting adobe lightroom (here). It's just full of options for getting the most out of your photos and there are loads of tutorials on the web about the program, such as lightroomkillertips.com. Anyway the main effect I used here is called split toning, this is where you can pick the colour and saturation for the highlights and the shadows independently, I pretty much used yellow for both but you can use complimentary colours. It can be a bit hit and miss but that's the beauty of shooting digitally.
The info on this shot is as follows: f16 (to maximise DOF) for 1/2 second (so using a tripod) at about 34mm (shot in aperture priority). I did shoot with an exposure compensation of -2 this means the shot was underexposed (for the sky), I was originally going to merge 2 shots, one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the land but in the end I left the land as a silhouette because I liked the impact of the sky. Hopefully going to get some shots in the peak district tomorrow, where my foreground interest will be rocks instead of trees!