An Early Morning Shoot

15/10/07

Scanning the forecast shows a cool night ahead – well relatively for this time of year. It’s the second week of August and clear skies are forecast. The shot I’ve been after could be on. It will mean another early start. This is the third time this week but it’s worth it. The heather in the New Forest peaks at different times. The bell heather is out first and perhaps has the best colour, but finishes early too, around now, although there are patches that last a lot longer if sheltered. Next, the common heather arrives. This is paler in colour and the flower heads are smaller, but it is more expansive with great swathes across certain parts of the Forest, particularly in the higher north. By higher, in the New Forest this means around 110 metres and for us locals this means breaking out the oxygen!

Anyway, the shot I’m after is a wide angle with heather close up and running down to mist in the distance. I’ve checked the sunrise angle which, if you remember back to your school days, varies throughout the year. For us in good old Blighty, this means it rises further north in the summer and correspondingly further south in the winter. This is why you will not get good sunsets on the south coast in July, because as they say in panto, “It’s behind you.” Have a read about my visit to Purbeck, headed Photographic Diary in this section which talks further about this.

Today the sun rises around 5.30am. I say around as one has to take into account the azimuth factor which basically means that the sun takes longer to rise above a mountain than the horizon at sea level. I’ve scanned the map for a possible location and will be heading north of Burley. With the cool night, I’m hopeful that the damp ground, you do still remember our summer of course, will mean that mist will form. I get up at 4am and have a quick peak. Although not in the Forest, I live close enough to it to get an idea. I can’t see much, but I can see that it’s a clear sky so the chances are that the shot is on. Julia, my long suffering wife, responds unintelligibly as I whisper that I’ll see her later. Taking care not to wake the neighbours, I grab my rucksack, flask and banana and head out. I always try to get on location around an hour before sunrise and usually start shooting from around 20 minutes before. As the road starts to climb, the mist starts to thicken. Obviously you must take this into account when working out how long it will take you to get to your location. Journey times will be longer and the possibility of ponies and other animals standing on the warmer road, is greater as well.

Having parked the car, donned my walking boots and loaded myself up with the equipment, I walk the inconsiderable 600metre distance to the ridge where I set up. Tripods are a must and care must be taken to ensure a firm footing for the legs to avoid mishaps. A few weeks ago on one of the PhotoTreks I do, (see www.PhotoNewForest.com via the Links page), I didn’t heed my own advice. One of the legs rested only on a tree root and it fell over. It’s interesting to see what’s inside an expensive Nikon lens nowadays!

I’m set up with a wide angle and fitted the Lee Filter holder via the 77mm adapter. Now it’s a case of waiting. ‘Waiting for the Light’, as David Noton’s title of his forthcoming book is aptly named. Sometimes you wait for days, returning time after time for conditions to be ‘As you like it’, this time by a certain Mr Shakespeare I believe!

When setting up always think about where your shadow will appear. As the light will be low initially the shadows will be long so just bear this in mind. Slowly to my left the cool blue warms to a slight glow increasing in intensity. In front of me the mist is lying quite thick, a little too thick at the moment. It’s nearing 5.30. For there to be colour you need light, and with the little light that there is I can see the colour of the heather in front of me now. As the mist is too thick, I use the time I have to wander around and find a good patch of heather to provide the foreground interest I’ve planned. The clump I decide upon has some grasses growing through which will add to the effect. There is little air movement to affect the grasses, but even if there was, a bit of movement rarely ruins a shot. Indeed sometimes it adds to it.

As the sun starts to illuminate the plain in front of me, some of the mist burns off to reveal hillocks just visible. The time is approaching 6am. I shoot without filters first. Sometimes I take a spot meter reading from the sky and then from an area on the land. I then compute the difference and decide upon a filter. More often nowadays though, I find that I shoot in matrix metering, review the histogram and adjust using exposure compensation to obtain a graph as far to the right as possible without highlights burning out. My brain is never much good first thing -indeed anytime some may say – and we may as well use these expensive computers we call cameras to do the maths. I settle on a 2 stop neutral density graduated filter to start with. Having messed up a number of times before, I now take the same shot not only at slightly different exposures, but also with the filters at lightly different positions in the mount. I can then make sure that I get the graduation at a point in the frame I am happy with. It’s alright using the depth of field preview to have a look and give an indication, but I find it clearer on a large screen.

With mist, I will also shoot slightly over exposed, the camera not me, to make the mist stand out a little more. Sometimes it works sometimes not depending upon the scene. Again, it’s easier to compare in post production and with digital there are no processing fees of course.

Back to today. It always amazes me how far down you have to angle the camera with a wide angle shot. I try various focal lengths but settle on as short as possible. Making sure that neither my nor the tripod legs as well as shadows are out of the frame I compose and fire a few frames with adjustments as aforementioned. It is now 40 minutes after sunrise. A lot of the mist has burnt off and the protruding detail provides what I’m looking for. Where I am, colours of the heathers and grasses are lit by the warming light, accentuating the yellows of the grasses which I try and capture. The LCD monitor looks good, but that can often hide the truth. I’ll see the reality later.

I move to another spot and shoot some tracks leading down to the moor in both portrait and landscape as always, for the libraries before heading home.

Once downloaded, I make my selection and process the image. Shooting in raw does I feel allow you to record the image and process it as you saw it. Frequently people say that they don’t process their images after taking the shot, forgetting that shooting in Jpeg, their cameras process the images for them, according to how the camera manufacturers techno nurds have programmed the chip.

Here’s my favourite image from the morning. Those wishing to know, it was shot at ISO100, at F13 for 1/5th second. Post production included a slight raise of the exposure, an increase in contrast and saturation and a slight adjustment to level the horizon – oops. Nothing that wouldn’t have been done with film and a wet room in the old days. Some may not like the clear blue sky, bit the magazine editors hopefully will as it enables them to add text here. Any way, it was the shot I was after. Job done.

PS I will be running an early morning shoot which you can attend. See the PhotoNewForest web site for further details.