6 Apri 2021

 Click on the images for a larger version.  All images copyright Leslie Ashe.

Managed to get out twice with the camera.  

Morning

With some light overnight snow I wanted to see if I could photograph a particular stand of trees in snow. I have already images of them in spring, summer autumn and winter but not with snow.   Unfortunately I had left it a bit late getting out and was disappointed by the lack of snow around the trees. 

 However, I was out and spent an hour trying a range of different compositions as the remaining snow disappeared as the sun rose. 

Just for practice I did some focus stacking as it was a while since I had done any - in this image the tree trunks  are falling away from the camera position.  This was a 4 shot stack and the tree trunks are sharp from front to back.

Evening

The second outing was to Strangford Lough for sunset.  It didn’t look promising as the cloud cover was all in the wrong place.  Suddenly there was a break behind Scrabo Tower and I scrambled to get a 3 stop grad in place before the light disappeared.  Looking at the image on the back of the camera I could see that despite the grad, the highlights were blown and so I took 3 images exposing for the highlights, mid-tones and shadows.  In the event, Lightroom enabled me to adjust the light from the single image to keep the highlights from blowing and also record shadow detail.  A reminder that the jpeg on the back of the camera has less exposure latitude than the raw file.

For comparison purposes the first image below is the single image and the second is the HDR.  Good old D810 plus Lightroom worked this time.