Tag: sunrise

Tranquility. Looking out across a flooded field at Bodiam, East Sussex.

Cokin ND4 grey grad filter, processed in Lightroom 5.7.

I made a spur of the moment decision today to head out to nearby Bodiam. The sky was clear and there was a heavy frost covering everything, including my car, of which a good 10 minutes was taken up defrosting the windscreen. I arrived after a short but careful drive just in time for first light, I put on my hat, gloves and wellies, grabbed my camera gear and quickly set up to start photographing.  The light was fairly even but to bring up the foreground grasses (trapped in ice and covered with frost) I decided to put on a ND4 (2 stop) graduated grey filter. ND Grads are an invaluable accessory for any landscape photographer and I really encourage you to invest in a filter system of some kind if you can.

I took a fair amount of similar shots to this, making slight adjustments in both composition and focal length (using my Sigma 10-20mm EX f4-5.6) but standing in the freezing cold meant that my fingers and toes started to go numb. This told me that I had been taking pictures in the same spot for far too long and it was high time I moved on to capture something else and my feet and fingers thanked me for it.

Other than my extremities getting a tad cold I had a really peaceful and pleasant time photographing. The only thing I encountered was that ice kept building up on the ND filter as well as on the top of my camera, so every few minutes I found myself having to wipe the filter with a lens cloth.  Never leave home without one.

I’ll be posting more shots from today over the next few posts.

Thanks for reading.