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Castlerigg
Stone Circle #4571 The Lake District, Cumbria, England |
Prints  See Ordering Prints for more information and framing options |
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Photographers: - How I took the image Obviously, I was up at dawn ready for the best light. On tripod as always, I set up the height very carefully so that the top of the central stone had the dark trees as a backdrop. It wouldn't have worked if this mid-toned stone had a similarly-toned background. Shooting RAW, as you always should if you're serious about quality, I then ensured everything would be in focus using the camera's depth-of-field preview button. I tried at f8, but it wasn't all sharp. f11 worked, so I chose this aperture. Why not just choose f22 you may ask? well, with smaller apertures, you get light diffraction issues - basically, your image will be soft. Staying in the middle of your lens' range - normally f8-f11 will ensure the best possible image quality with this kind of image. I then used mirror lock-up during image capture to reduce vibration, combined with a 2 second self-timer setting on a Canon 1DS MkII. Then I spent a while just taking in the magnificent setting. Back on the computer I processed the same file twice - once for the foreground and once for the sky, at about 1.5 stops apart, then combined them. Then I converted the image to a Tiff, which automatically produces a 47.5mb file from my Canon RAW originals. See the bottom of this page for the EXIF information |