Making Hay by the Sea

Another picture from the long Scottish glooming. I just walked up the lane from the house we were staying at in Drum (a friend of my friend the intrepid driver on this journey). The house faces the North Sea across some agricultural fields…a truly beautiful setting. I saw these bales on the way down the lane and could not resist them. The warmth of the hay against the cold of the sea on the horizon, the shapes, the soft light. Magical stuff. There was just a touch of ocean haze, but the softness may have added to the magic.

Sony DSC H50 at about 65mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/125th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto.

Though I adjusted the exposure to try for a balance between sky and foreground in the camera (by tipping the camera up to read more sky than ground and then locking exposure), the sky still needed a graduated filter effect in Lightroom to bring out details in the clouds. I used to use the Recovery slider to do this, but the graduated filter effect has the advantage of leaving the highlights in the rest of the image unaffected. Recovery, if overused, can make the whole image a bit flat. I am using a reversed graduated filter from the bottom quite a bit these days, to increase brightness, but mainly to increase clarity and contrast where there is a lot of detail without adding a lot of noise to the sky. Then my usual Clarity and Vibrance settings in the Presence panel and the Landscape sharpen preset.

From Scotland.