For 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 produced a 47.5mb file
from my Canon RAW original.
