So here's part 2 of my blogs about my trip to Botallack and Land's End. This second part is about the time we spent at Land's End. I thought I would start with my favourite landscape shot from the sunset.
This was photographed on a Hasselblad H3D and is the result of only 1 image with no ND graduated filter. To those who are reading this and often shoot landscapes and/or sunsets, you are probably surprised that I chose not to use any technique to balance the exposure between the sky and land. Well, as you probably know digital Hasselblads have extremely good retention of detail in both shadows and highlights. Well, I had already photographed a couple other scenes as the sun was setting and this was the last and as a test (knowing that I had a couple others to fall back on if this hadn't worked) I only shot the one exposure that was taken for the sky to be about half a stop under-exposed. Therefore, on looking back at this image in post, it was very dark to start with. Working in Camera Raw, I brought the shadows up to close to 100 and the highlights down quite a lot to give the starts of an okay looking image. I then used two ND grads to finish the edit. The lower filter increased the exposure by 3 stops and the top filter decreased the exposure by about 1 stop. Now all I had to deal with was colour boosting certain aspects. I warmed the image and introduced a magenta hue to the whole image, then using the HSL panel (which if you don't use already, you should certainly have a look at) to increase the yellow saturation, which affected both the sky and the gorse, so that was a balancing game too. Finally I opened the file in Photoshop and created a duplicate layer and used a curves adjustment to brighten everything. I inverted the mask and painted the brightness into the path that led through the gorse bushes toward the sunset, as I wanted to make this line quite prominent.
This was photographed on a Hasselblad H3D and is the result of only 1 image with no ND graduated filter. To those who are reading this and often shoot landscapes and/or sunsets, you are probably surprised that I chose not to use any technique to balance the exposure between the sky and land. Well, as you probably know digital Hasselblads have extremely good retention of detail in both shadows and highlights. Well, I had already photographed a couple other scenes as the sun was setting and this was the last and as a test (knowing that I had a couple others to fall back on if this hadn't worked) I only shot the one exposure that was taken for the sky to be about half a stop under-exposed. Therefore, on looking back at this image in post, it was very dark to start with. Working in Camera Raw, I brought the shadows up to close to 100 and the highlights down quite a lot to give the starts of an okay looking image. I then used two ND grads to finish the edit. The lower filter increased the exposure by 3 stops and the top filter decreased the exposure by about 1 stop. Now all I had to deal with was colour boosting certain aspects. I warmed the image and introduced a magenta hue to the whole image, then using the HSL panel (which if you don't use already, you should certainly have a look at) to increase the yellow saturation, which affected both the sky and the gorse, so that was a balancing game too. Finally I opened the file in Photoshop and created a duplicate layer and used a curves adjustment to brighten everything. I inverted the mask and painted the brightness into the path that led through the gorse bushes toward the sunset, as I wanted to make this line quite prominent.
 |  |
The two images above are of the same flower and fly, simply two different perspectives. The first I took to exploit the strong sunset light and create a silhouette of the fly, without losing the context of the environment. The image on the right has not had a huge edit done, just contrast to increase the haloing effect of back-lighting and then I brightened the shadows, as I like to see some detail in the back of the flower.
The second image on the right was taken mostly for the fly. I had to use a smaller aperture than I usually would at this level of light, as it meant sacrificing shutter speed, which I then had to compensate for by increasing the ISO. Looking back at it I would have preferred to find an angle in which I could have got less of the flower in focus and more (or the same) amount of the fly in focus.
The second image on the right was taken mostly for the fly. I had to use a smaller aperture than I usually would at this level of light, as it meant sacrificing shutter speed, which I then had to compensate for by increasing the ISO. Looking back at it I would have preferred to find an angle in which I could have got less of the flower in focus and more (or the same) amount of the fly in focus.
I have only included one bird photograph from the day, this male Stonechat sat atop this bush backlit by the warm sunset and the gorse also lit provided a colourful backdrop. As the background was quite far off I chose an aperture which would get all of the bird in focus (F/5.6). The edit for this one was not so easy and I cannot fully remember the process, so I won't bore you with that this time. Instead, I'll just mention how good a photographic spot Land's End. Not only for the landscape that it is so popular for, but also the wildlife. Starlings and Jackdaws are all around the grounds and there are also a lot of Rabbits hopping about which I didn't get any amazing photographs of this time. The two best species for me however were the Stonechats (male pictured above) and Wheatears. I have some images of the Wheaters, but I am not putting them in this post, just because I much prefer this backlit Stonechat.
Thanks to everyone who read this and feel free to share, like and comment! It's all really appreciated.
Thanks to everyone who read this and feel free to share, like and comment! It's all really appreciated.