A scene from last Saturday just outside my village. This weekend all the snow has gone, which while good for travel, has left the place looking a little drab….

Early morning sun struggles through the snow clouds last Saturday morning. I was standing knee deep here, and more was on the way.

The Merlin II in Stromness harbour in Orkney – August 2009.

The view from Clach Na Ben. Wish I was there now……

The huge Neolithic Ring of Brodgar on Orkney.

One of the Standing Stones of Stenness on Orkney.

A half moon hangs over the frozen stone circle at Loanhead of Daviot. The approaching dawn did nothing to raise the temperature…..

Evening at the Ring of Brodgar stone circle on Orkney.

The dawn sun rises over the 4000 year old stone circle in Aberdeenshire, NE Scotland. This shot is actually very realistic and it truly was a spectacular dawn – if you’d like to know how I did it, then read more….

Firstly, I got up at 5am! I knew the site well and it’s only 30 mins from my house, but I still wanted to get there early enough to get set up and get the best vantage point to view the rising sun. You could take this shot with a modern Point & Shoot, but to get the right image quality you’re best using a SLR. I took a Canon 400D (Rebel) along with a Sigma 10-20mm lens, a tripod and a remote shutter release – the last 2 are all about avoiding camera shake.

I set up my tripod & camera and the the real benefit of the Sigma kicked in straight away – the circle is surrounded by a close fence, so although I was only standing 6 feet from the wall at the bottom of the shot, the whole circle was in view. I fired off a couple of auto shots to check composition, and made sure my camera was level. Then it was just a matter of waiting.

Shooting a dawn, you are obviously going to have a very bright central point to the shot, but with a dark foreground and although your eyes can easily deal with the High Dynamic Range of such a view, your camera can’t – it’s usually a case of suffering either an under-exposed foreground to get the sun, or an overexposed sky to get the detail in the shadows. Expensive filters or being a top photographer can deal with this, but being an amateur I prefer free! So I used a setting on my camera called AEB or Automatic Exposure Bracketing. Simply put, one press of the shutter takes 3 exposures – one ‘normal’, one underexposed and one over exposed, across a range of stops set by your self – I went for +/-2. Later, these 3 shots can be combined into 1.

Settings: Camera on manual focus set to infinity and AEB enabled as above. Because I was on a tripod and using a remote release there was no danger of shake so I set ISO 100 for lowest possible noise. Aperture Priority mode (Av) was chosen and set to F13 for  a sharp depth of field throughout the shot.  As the sun rose I cranked down to F22 to accentuate the starburst effect to the sun you see above.

As the sun rose over 10 minutes, I took a set of 3 shots every 30 seconds or so as the light and colours changed. Eventually the sun rose above the clouds and the show was over.

Processing: Minimal processing of the RAW files really amounted to setting the White Balance to suit, ensuring that it was the same within each group of 3 shots. After that I chose a group of 3 I liked best and imported them into a free Open Source program called Qtpfsgui and combined them and Tonemapped them. This then produced a final JPEG which was sharpened slightly and is presented above. A really simple process that results in a realistic shot of difficult lighting conditions. You may also know this process as ‘HDR’ but hopefully this shows you that you don’t have to produce glowing purple abominations that often go under the same title!

I hope this has been interesting to those of you that have read this far – if you’d like me to do it again in future let me know in the comments. Likewise if you want any more info on the process above just drop me a line. Thanks.

The peak of Mither Tap seen from Oxen Craig on Bennachie.