Near Tisbury...

Excellent walking country, on the Wiltshire/Dorset border, on a superb autumn morning...all 7 miles of mine!

Tisbury is one stop down from Salisbury on the London - Exeter line and costs all of £4.80 return, any time of day, even if that is the first train of the day, which is the one I caught.

Got there in darkness, it was then breezy and cloudy and then started to clear but then didn't...lots of rain fell overnight, very squelchy underfoot and still many trees down from that recent storm. Removed a big branch for a lady motorist who could not pass as it stuck right out, that must have come down last night.

The morning did brighten up gloriously from just about after I took this and I could have posted a dozen up, but somehow it was the composition that clinched this one for me. With the sun blazing, it was all too much, huge contrast and flare as the fast Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 struggled (fast lenses aren't as good against the light as slower ones, probably due to the larger front element surface area) and even then, only the front bit of the field was vibrantly acid green as the low sun couldn't lever itself over the hill.

This is not an HDR - I've yet to try one of those - and I didn't use a filter either, but I did selectively alter brightness and contrast quite a lot, often in quite small areas, to build it up, or tone it down. I then added a small amount of warm-up filtration.

So, after my dallying with ultrawides and fisheyes in the depth of the night, with the tripod, doing silly length exposures, it was really great to just don a rucksack, a couple of lenses, a map and a flask of coffee - oh, the freedom!

Speaking of tripods, mine is in need of repair. The clasp spring has weakened so much one of the leg segments does not 'hold' properly. It happened before and I bought the modular bit necessary for less than £7 direct from Italy (Manfrotto) and fixed it myself, using a standard Allen key. I really must get googling or digging out old emails and get the ball rolling, considering how much I use the darned thing!