Wind was howling this afternoon. A steady 15 knots with gusts much stronger. Enough I had to set the tripod with the legs extra wide so it didn’t blow over.
The clouds didn’t quite want to cooperate. And I really need a 3 stop reverse GND, as 2 stops is nowhere near enough. Blew the highlights even on shots that were just too dark. But I got one or two that looked good enough. I like this one because of the birds.
Here’s a version cropped to 8×10:
And here it is properly exposed — except for the sun, which is totally blown out. I was boxing the “correct” exposure because of all the silly things I was doing with the GND and reverse GND filters in there, and I’m glad I did. Getting the sun a stop down helped the image above. The benefits of digital. Just fire five shots, two below, two above, and one of them might be close to right.
I am not going to composite these, but if I was willing to cheat that much I could graft the better foreground in to the one with the better sun. The ones above I just clicked “Auto” and let the software bring the exposure up a little. The one below I lowered the highlights until I got it as close to in gamut as possible, but the sun is so blown out there’s just no detail to be recovered.
Note the vignetting. That’s the cheap GNDs stacked. They do it a little one at a time, but it is really accentuated when using more than one. If I print one, it’ll be 8×10, so I can crop some of the vignetting and put the sun and birds in a more aesthetically pleasing location.