Fishley Coppice -First Light

Just managed to get out before sunrise 6:07 where I am.  The weather forecast suggested it would be the best part of the day and as I look out from the study window, it looks as though they were right.

I had a very pleasurable walk over fields and through a small coppice of trees.  I got my obligatory sunrise with tree but quite liked this image from within the coppice looking towards the sun and open field.  Other images are on Flickr.

Technical:  This (and the other shots on Flickr) are HDRs converted using Nik Software HDR Efex Pro.  The bracketing was 3 shots, 2 stops apart, based on the automatic exposure value from the camera.  In most cases I had also used a 2 stop ND grad to hold back the sky.  This particular image also had some gradient and radial filter work in Lightroom.

Nb.  I still feel this remains true to the original scene.  Shooting into the sun usually produces images of high contrast with blown highlights and deep shadow while our eyes cope with these scenes much better and resolve detail in both the highlight and shadow areas.  I use HDR to reproduce the scene I saw.  One thing I will say is that the modern cameras handle these scenes and retain detail in the extreme areas of exposure much better than previous generation.  I'd like to still have a D700 to see how well it would have worked in comparison.  When I use the Olympus E-M10 it doesn't cope as well and I will usually bracket 1 stop apart to counteract this limitation.