The four trees on the horizon are a favourite subject of mine, and while on my way to make some sunset photographs of Arthur’s Stone, I saw this photograph. The contrast between the sky and foreground was quite high, but I was helped as the clouds decreased some of this. Even so I still needed a Graduated ND 0.9 or 3 stop filter to bring the sky into the same exposure range as the foreground. I darkened the sky further in Adobe Lightroom later by another third of a stop using the graduated filter tool. I find that I am using this tool more and more as it gives the opportunity to get some subtle changes that are not an option with the limited capacity of the ND graduated filters on offer with their fixed strengths. Having just looked at the photograph again, I think there is a horizontal photographic opportunity that I missed at the time. By cutting off the cotton grass and concentrating more on the trees on the horizon I could have emphasised the sunbeams more.
I also took some close up photographs of the cotton grass (need to check that this is the correct name), but had to wait for the sun to be blocked by the clouds to once again lessen the contrast. The wind was moving the grass stems but most of them are sharp and although I tried various aperture settings to vary the depth of field, the image below looked the best and was made with an aperture of F11.
