Nature blessed me today

There are days when the weather forecast gets me all excited, and I spend my evening planning a potentially perfect outdoor shoot. Today was one of those.

It started with my evening routine checking the weather forecast on the MetOffice website. All seemed to be perfect for night photography, and I could finally do that tutorial on Star photography I’ve been meant to do for ages, but the skies were still against me. Or more precisely, the Moon, as it is full this week and therefore too bright to do any good star rendition. Instead, I started thinking of a sunrise shoot, and I dived into my “potential shots” folder where I keep, as its name implies, snaps of locations that have the X factor (as Mr Cowel would say). I came across this old selfie of my daughter and me taken in the Pentland hills on the outskirt of Edinburgh:

This was it! The place I was going to hike to around 5 am. I knew exactly the sunrise time; it’s angle and direction. I know there was going to be barely any cloud and no wind whatsoever.

I scouted for about 30min before finding the perfect spot and set my new Manfrotto travel tripod (i am going to talk to you next week):

The trick in setting the exposure is that when you set up your gear, you do not know what the exposure is going to be. This is one of the reasons I always use the Liveview mode on my DSLR to frame and expose the shot. My Aperture is my usual landscape one: f13 et my ISO well the obvious 100. For the Focusing I used the Hyperfocal distance which I covered in an earlier episode.

The exposure was achieved with the help of my Lee 0.6 ND Grad Soft and Hard filter and my Lee Polarising filter.

The top photo is the result.

After about team shots, same settings but the light falling differently on the hills I decided the window was over and it was time to wrap up. Suddenly as I turn around, I notice a mighty mist was envying the valley. Set the gear again and here is the result:

Misty sunrise on the Pentland Hills

Once obtained it was time to head home and check the result in Adobe Lightroom.

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