Standing in a Rape Field

You have to marvel at the speed with which the cloud changes around sunrise and sunset.  I was out early, looking at a clear sky to the east and a cloudy sky to the west.  It looked as though the sun would rise without any clouds in its quadrant.

I'd thought about where to be for sunrise and chosen this field and these three trees, which I assumed would be lit by the rising sun.  I hadn't banked on these clouds, but in the time it took me to walk from the car, along the footpath to this point (probably less than 5 minutes), the banked clouds to the west had spread out across the sky to provide this backdrop.  The viewpoint is looking north.  

I must admit that the last few days have been a pleasure to be out early.  Hopefully a good omen for spring.

AJC has asked me how I post processed the image.  So here goes

Technical: First of all, in camera I used a 2 stop ND hard grad to lower the sky's exposure.  This can have a negative impact, by darkening the trees and making them blocky and lacking detail.  I deal with that in post processing.

Import into Lightroom.  Check exposure and use black and whites to pull back any over or under exposure.  On this occasion I loved the sky's pattern so I took the image into Photoshop and created a Silver Efex Pro layer on top (Structure preset).  I then changed the blending mode of this black and white layer to luminosity.  This can give a garish result so I reduced opacity to about 40%.

Saved back into Lightroom, I increased the warmth slightly (The luminosity layering in Photoshop often cools the resultant image).  I then used the radial filter around the branches of each tree and increased shadows to bring back detail in the trees (this reduces the impact of the grad filter, without lightening the background sky).


Sharpen, and a slight vignette to finish.