Big Wiltshire Skies #1

Thanks to all who helped helicopter lift my Storms over the Plain up into the Spotlight yesterday. It sits there still!

I knew it would be a dramatic shot when I took it but I certainly didn't think it would earn a dozen hearts and a whole heap of stars. Again, thank YOU!

What I love about the local south west Wiltshire landscape are the skies and the way tracks and tree clumps can compositionally transform an image. For me, there is little finer than a packed lunch, a flask of dangerously strong coffee, a good (old fashioned large-scale) Ordnance Survey map and mixed weather. Walk for a few hours, take snaps of anything and everything and soak it all in.

One of the reasons for Nikkor 10-24mm lens purchase was for this type of landscape and along with the lightweight D7000, a mid range zoom, such as the 17-70mm Sigma plus a long zoom, my Tamron SP 70-300mm, chuck in a 1.4x converter and I have the 35mm focal eqvuivalent of 15-560mm, with none of the lenses being of too huge a range as to lessen in quality too much - and to have a polariser fitted to each too.

A polariser on the 10-24mm brought about this one and now the clouds have dispersed giving a clear-blue sky, which is not what I wanted, so this from earlier really suits the high contrast cloud separation I have here.

Tomorrow, I have the first official event to photograph for quite a while, Salisbury's St George's Day celebrations. So will spend today calm and collected doing odd jobs and housework. I take such commissions seriously - I am the only one doing it and whilst I've done this one for the past five years, the venue has changed, moving from the Market Square to the Guildhall. So, faster lenses and fill-in flash instead of outdoor natural light. I'm always confident and never panic and it always somehow works out just fine - you know what to expect for tomorrow's Blip now!

Don't forget to look in Large - 'L' key