Digital Camera World - UK (2020-03)

Reader 1

Brian Wakeling

ocking up at Stanage Edge

half an hour before sunrise,

we were surprised to discover

that we weren’t alone. Four

Sheffield University students were huddled

on a large boulder, camera phones at the

ready in anticipation of one of nature’s finest

displays. (It was unclear whether they’d been

up all night or, like us, had been prised from

our slumbers at a most unreasonable time.)

After taking a few different sunrise captures,

we descended carefully to the foot of the

stones and set up our tripods facing into the

Dove Valley. The patterns of the stone walls

in the fields below soon caught Brian’s eye.

Choosing his lens with the longest reach,

he zoomed in for some detail.

“The shadows from the low sun were

emphasising the lines of the walls,” he says.

“Using my telephoto lens, I framed out the

bright sky, so I could then concentrate on

the textures, colours and shapes on the

ground. I like the end result, particularly how

the walls come to a point at the left-hand

side of the frame, and the different layers

of texture of the fields – from the rough

grass in the foreground, to the dead

bracken via the smoother grass.”

Expert opinion

Brian is right to flag up the patterns and

texture in this image. The lines of the stone

walls in the lower half of the image almost

track each other perfectly, but the angle

of the walls at the top of the image diverge

to create extra interest. And the variance

in the ground – three quite different

textures – is the link between it all.

This scene was well observed by Brian.

R

Sunrise? Grab a grad...

Facing such extremes of contrast during

a sunrise, you need all the help you can

get with exposures – starting with a

tripod to enable longer shutter speeds

while using a small aperture for image

sharpness. Although Brian didn’t bring

a graduated filter with him (next time!),

he was able to recover some foreground

detail from shadow areas in his raw files.

Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark III

Lens EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 at 150mm

Exposure 1/60 sec at f/11, ISO 200; -0.3 EC

92 DIGITAL CAMERA^ MARCH 2020 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com

Challenge 1

Shoot a landscape

at Stanage Edge