From Butser Hill, to the Isle of Wight

...from Butser Hill, at 271m, 889 ft, the second highest point in the South Downs National Park. See Wikipedia, for details.

I met up with good friend Des in Winchester, him driving down from London and me going up by train. Our day took in a drive east to Petersfield and the wonderful, 360 degree views from Butser Hill. This is the view south, I really liked the shapes of the receding hills and sneaks of the Solent that separates the Isle of Wight with the mainland.

See the details on LARGE

With the naked eye you couldn’t see Portsmouth’s iconic Spinnaker Tower. It was only when I attached my 1.4x teleconverter to the Tamron SP 70-300mm VC used here, (total focal length equivalent = 560mm) did I clearly see the two towers in Portsmouth poking through the far dank atmosphere. But for this shot, I wanted the end of the hills in too and so this is taken without the converter and the Tamron zoomed out a little from the maximum.

The sky was originally quite a weird very pale but muddy dusky rose hue, (middle of afternoon?) which looked great in real life but just looked odd in the photo, especially with the quite heavily blue base. So, in the end I faded the sky to black and white but kept the base a bluish tone and lightened this part considerably.

That distinctive cloud was definitely a bonus but I wanted its inclusion to be believable and part of the overall picture – it would have been tempting to whack up the contrast and darkened it and made it all biblical and dramatic but I wanted it to set off what’s underneath it rather than make it the main feature. No doubt I’ll have edited it totally differently if I started it from scratch again, it certainly was an interesting scene and RAW file to fiddle with.

It sure seemed strange to be actually driven to the top of a long big hill – and to not have had to walk miles and miles and miles to get there.... I actually feel that I'd cheated!

Thank you Des!! He had to get back up home by the evening and with dull weather, I came on back home.

Thanks to ALL who got my starry fisheye time exposure Blip of yesterday up to 4th position in the Spotlights! Very much appreciated, as always!