Photo of the Month: May 2015

Branch line

 22nd May 2015, Crombie, Fife

May this year has seen some very moody skies at sunset in western Fife. Fortunately I have a few very local spots where I can watch a sky develop from my car and decide how I am going to shoot it.  Sometimes I use small country lanes as my foreground lead-in but with the recent sunny weather the crops are now maturing and this allows me to use the tractor lines in the fields as a lead-in. Tonight's sunset was another spectacular one and the field is less than a mile from home.  
The image presented a challenge due to the large dynamic range between the shadow areas and the highlights in the sky on the horizon. In these situations I initially ignore the extreme highlights and bracket 3 exposures metering off the foreground, using a graduated neutral density filter to balance the sky. A 4th exposure was taken from a spot meter reading just above the horizon to capture the highlight detail.  The final image was manually blended from three of the four images taken using layer masks in Photoshop. 


Technical Info:

Taken with a Fujifilm X-T1
Fujinon XF 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR lens @ 18mm

EXIF: ISO-200 / f/8 / 1/3 sec / 1/15 sec / 2/3 sec, 3 exposures blended
Lee filters: 

RAW File converted to TIFF in Fuji RAW converter powered by Silkypix, developed in Adobe PSE9


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