The West Ring

… but it was worth it Mind you, it was my own stupid fault for not believing the sunrise time on Metcheck I wanted to try out my new tripod on the sunrise so decided to go out without the hounds. I was on my way to Hankley when I saw the reflection of the sky in Thursley Moat Pond so turned around and parked up.

It would seem that my brain hadn’t woken up yet because I was out-foxed by my tripod… I was disappointed to find that the legs only extended once, which meant I spent the entire morning kneeling down. In my defence the other extension isn’t obvious! (It’s one of those twist to unlock ones, and doesn’t have clips. I’m not quite THAT useless!)

Luckily, I noticed the ISO was on 800 before taking too many pics. (Wondered why the shutter speed was so fast… ) After taking a few shots and looking at the histogram I saw that there wasn’t anything in the right hand third indicating it was waaay underexposed. I realised that it was time - I had to be brave and use the manual mode I did enjoy playing with the aperture and shutter speeds to get the correct exposure. I even had a go at deliberately under exposing slightly but haven’t had time to investigate how well it worked.

I’ve only had time to do a quick cull and play with one of the early shots in Elements. I think there are some that are pretty good, even if I do say so myself! But as a teaser here is the one I’ve had a play with:

The cropped original

The tweaked one (light tones -100)

Any preference? The above tweak was deliberately extreme for my benefit. I know that something in-between might well be the best choice.

My plan is to try and post up some of the others every couple of days or so. I’ve also got some more pictures of the hounds at Hankley from this weekend that I need to go through…

Larger versions available in the Gallery.