Harvest Sunset

We got some torrential rain around lunch time today.  Fortunately it cleared and when I went for a late walk the clouds allowed the setting sun to illuminate the recently harvested fields.  The farm hands were feverishly working away in an adjacent field, baling the straw before the wet weather forecast for the end of the week, made things more difficult. 

I couldn't make up my mind and particularly liked the extra image because of the underlit leaves in the tree.  Again you can only marvel at the ability of the latest generation of sensors to retain this information.  On first looking at the raw file, i had doubted it was possible to show off the leaves. 

Technical:  Just a 3 stop hard ND grad.  I did bracket exposures but was able to recover shadow and highlight detail in Lightroom.  I much prefer to deliver images without resorting to HDR, where I can.