Evening Shoot on Higger Tor

I was out on Wednesday evening, heading over to the Peak District to photograph the landscape. The plan was to meet up with a friend at Higger Tor in the hope of shooting a great sunset. The conditions were forecast to be perfect.

Once on Higger Tor, we spent an hour or so finding possible compositions and I was also testing a new lens. Then in the distance, I saw beautiful light rays breaking through the cloud, so I set my tripod up and fired off a few frames.

After about 5 minutes, I decided to switch to the new lens I was testing. I turned away for a couple of minutes at most, but when I turned back, the light was gone. We both looked at each other in disbelieve at how the conditions had changed. In the distance we could now see rain starting in the valley. Looking at the radar data on a weather app, we could see that the only rain cloud for miles was heading directly for us.

Initially, we thought the rain would miss us but that wasn’t to be. We ended up retreating to the car in the hope that it would clear. Fortunately, the rain did stop about 15 minutes before sunset, and I managed to capture a few images that I like. Here’s one of them.

This is shot with a Panasonic Lumix G9 micro four thirds camera. The lens is the Leica 8-18 at 8mm, and I used a 3 stop reverse ND grad filter on the sky. It’s a tripod mounted exposure of 1/25” at f/8.0 and ISO200. I also had the camera set to use high resolution mode, so the image is around 10,700 pixels on the long edge.

To process the image, I used DxO PureRAW first on the RAW file. This produced a DNG file which I then edited in Lightroom to correct the colour and tone. After that, I exported the images to Photoshop where I applied a few tweaks with Nik Color Efex Pro and Nik Viveza to finish it off.

Overall, it was a successful evening shoot although things felt a little rushed.

I hope you like the image and have a great weekend.