Bassenthwaite Lake sunbeams

It looks better LARGE!

A relatively early start for me this morning - after The Cumberland newspaper interviewed me over the phone yesterday, they sent a photographer round first thing this morning to take my picture! So an early alarm and I just got downstairs as he pulled up.

We went down to the side of Bassenthwaite lake to give a decent background - he even managed some on-camera fill in flash to prevent me being a complete silhouette. The light on and around the Lake was beautiful, but he was on a really tight schedule. As soon as he had his pics, he dropped me back home. I dived in my car and drove straight back to the lake.

The clouds were gathering fast, but I just had time to get these crepuscular rays (sorry - had to get that in!) over the next headland. By the time I got back home the rain had started and it hasn't let up all day.

Interesting shot to process:

I bracketed three shots 1 stop apart - and used a 0.6 Hard edged grad to try to hold detail in the bright clouds. I tried an HDR, but no options within Photomatix or Nik HDR pro gave me a natural effect with detail in those bright clouds. Instead, I imported the light and dark photos onto PhotoShop, stacked them together with the lighter picture on the top, and used a layer mask with a very faint brush to gradually pull the cloud detail out from the lower (dark) layer. I thought it gave a much more natural result.

I confess to taking the shot from slightly too high, so used content aware scale on the water to reduce the apparent distance between the grasses and the far shore. Then added a Silver efex pro layer to pull out more detail in the crepuscular rays - again layer masking the rest of the layer so as to not affect the sky or water.

Then PhotoShop locked up!

So I had to do it all again!!!!

Really hope you like it!