Recently I met a friend in the Lake District for some photography. After a good start the light became too harsh, so we waited it out whilst drinking coffee and eating cake. We did though have a plan. We wanted to be on top of a hill called Tom Heights at the end of the day to capture the sunset. That’s when I shot this image.
View of Coniston Water from Tom Heights. Fuji XT3 with Fuji 10-24 lens at 10mm. Tripod Mounted Exposure of 1/20” at f/13.0 and ISO160. No filters.
At the time, I didn’t think the horizontal format work well because of the foreground rock. I had it in my head that I wanted the foreground to take up more of the frame. But now that I look at the shot on the computer, I realise that it has some good lines and I prefer the composition.
Now let’s look at the same shot taken with the camera in the vertical position.
View 2 of Coniston Water from Tom Heights. Fuji XT3 with Fuji 10-24 lens at 10mm. Tripod mounted exposure of 1/28” at f/13.0 and ISO160. No filters.
You may have your favourite out of the two, but I should tell you, not everything is as it seems in this second shot.
You see switching to the vertical orientation with an extreme wide-angle lens made it difficult to get close enough to the foreground. My idea was to get close and fill the frame with the rock and heather as the main subject pointing to the distant water. Unfortunately, even though I had the camera only a couple of feet from the subject the wide-angle killed a lot of the impact as well as capturing the tripod leg in the corner of the frame.
The tripod leg was easy to fix in Photoshop using Content Aware Fill. I then used the Transform Perspective command and Liquify Filter to change the perspective, enlarging the foreground. It’s not something I do a lot but it’s interesting how it can produce a different feel.
If you want to see how I took the shot and edited the image, it’s in this YouTube video that I’ve just released (https://youtu.be/ANz1X48zXq8).
I also wanted to mention that Lenscraft in Focus comes out this weekend. When it’s published you can read it here (https://lenscraft.co.uk/lenscraft-photography-blog/photography-newsletter/) along with past issued. If you have subscribed, it will land in your email inbox sometime on Saturday.
I hope you like the photos and video and have a great weekend.
