On Wednesday, the weather forecast was looking good, so I decided to head out for some landscape photography with a friend.
Following the recent reopening of a local car park (it’s been closed for over a year), we headed onto Marsden Moor at Standedge and followed the Pennine Way. This is only a 10-minute drive from home followed by around a 20 minutes’ walk to get into position. It’s somewhere that I have ignored as a photography location for the past 20 years. But then, just prior to the car park closing, I was enjoying the location so extremely nice to be back.
The conditions on the edge were good but extremely windy and I was struggling to keep the camera steady. At the time, I also felt a little disappointed when I viewed my RAW files on the camera. They seemed to lack contrast and colour. I therefore had to rely on the camera histogram to tell me that the exposure was correct. The only thing that I could do with the viewfinder and LCD was compose the image. I suppose this is what I should be doing anyway.
Fortunately, having now transferred the RAW files onto my computer, I can see that I managed to capture nice light in a few of them. Here’s one that I like, just before we lost the sun behind a bank of clouds on the horizon.
This is a single frame using a Panasonic Lumix G9 Micro Four Thirds camera. The lens was the Leica 8-18 at 11mm. It’s a tripod mounted exposure of 1/40” at f/8.0 and ISO200. I also had a 3-stop ND Grad filter on the sky to prevent it from overexposing.
In terms of processing, I converted the RAW file to the DNG format using DxO PureRAW which also applied sharpening and noise reduction. The DNG file was then processed in Lightroom to balance the exposure and open the shadows a little on the dark rocks. After that I applied the Nik Collection (Color Efex Pro and Viveza) to finish the image.
I hope that you like the shot and have a great weekend.
The Lightweight Photographer 
That’s a very nice image, I particularly like the light but can’t decide if the rock in the foreground, for me, has a bit much visual weight, but my the eye is lead past this and stops in the sun region, which is well within the image and that is good. I would appreciate your comments on what you had in mind with the composition.
Also, is there a particular reason you used the Panasonic G9 rather than the Fuji X-T5.
Thanks for the interesting newsletter
Ross
Hi Ross,
I’m pleased that you like the image. Perhaps the rock in the foreground does have too much weight but then that’s where nature put them. The area is cluttered with rocks and with high winds to contend with I had to fall back on my proven compositional system. Walk around using the viewfinder to determine what looks best. It may not be perfect but I had to shoot the wonderful light. I also wanted to produce something different from the others I shot.
As for the G9, it’s a great landscape camera and very sharp. I enjoy using it but was also testing out a new kit for a future trip when I plan to take the G9. I will be revisiting the area with the XT5, hopefully in the near future.
Hi Robin
Thank you for your insight, it’s always very helpful reading how you make these images, particularly using non-adobe software.