Otto Berkeley
Whispering Light
There's been no shortage of wonderful sunrises across the UK over the past several months, and this sunrise, captured on a freezing, frosty and foggy late-December morning, seemed like an ideal opportunity to revisit the south-eastern meadow inside Morden Hall Park, which I last photographed during the autumn over a year ago.
Despite the park's expansive 125 acres of photogenic parkland, wetlands and bridges over the River Wandle, this scene has always been one of my favourite spots to watch the sunrise. I opted for a wider set-up than my previous take, partly to capture the thick layer of fog accumulating around the meadow as the sun came up, but also because I felt this would help to put the tree into some kind of context. The fog was much thicker before dawn, and it was important to me to try to convey the magic this created, but at the same time the sunrise provided a perfect focal point in the image and seemed to complete the scene. To incorporate both of these elements, I continued shooting for a couple of hours, and then used a combination of luminosity and gradient masking, along with the Soft Light and Overlay blend modes, to merge captures of the predawn fog and frost with captures of the sun as it appeared behind the trees and cast a golden glow through the fog.
Once the exposures had been blended, I used a mixture of Curves, Colour Balance and Selective Colour adjustments to bring out the chilly early-morning tones in the shadows of the meadow, while emphasising the warmer tones on the horizon, which was largely achieved with a low-opacity Colour Lookup set to the Crisp Warp preset and using Soft Light. Contrast and structure were reduced in the shadows using Silver Efex Pro set to Luminosity, as I wanted to keep the scene as natural-looking as possible, but I gently increased the texture where the sun was projecting across the meadow using the Detail Extractor and Tonal Contrast filters in Colour Efex Pro, as this seemed to help draw the viewer's eye along the ground, beyond the tree stumps and on towards the sunrise.
It was important to me to convey the simplicity of the lone bare tree at the centre of the foggy sunrise, so I tried keep the post-processing as inconspicuous as I could. The final change I made was to gently blend in a brighter exposure along a small footpath through the frame, which seemed perfectly aligned as it crossed beneath the tree and continued into the distance where the sun was appearing on the horizon. As ethereal as the scene is on a morning when the parkland is almost deserted, the footpath seemed to add a hint of a human element, leaving a reminder that beautiful landscape and dramatic weather conditions are there to be seen and enjoyed.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.
Whispering Light
There's been no shortage of wonderful sunrises across the UK over the past several months, and this sunrise, captured on a freezing, frosty and foggy late-December morning, seemed like an ideal opportunity to revisit the south-eastern meadow inside Morden Hall Park, which I last photographed during the autumn over a year ago.
Despite the park's expansive 125 acres of photogenic parkland, wetlands and bridges over the River Wandle, this scene has always been one of my favourite spots to watch the sunrise. I opted for a wider set-up than my previous take, partly to capture the thick layer of fog accumulating around the meadow as the sun came up, but also because I felt this would help to put the tree into some kind of context. The fog was much thicker before dawn, and it was important to me to try to convey the magic this created, but at the same time the sunrise provided a perfect focal point in the image and seemed to complete the scene. To incorporate both of these elements, I continued shooting for a couple of hours, and then used a combination of luminosity and gradient masking, along with the Soft Light and Overlay blend modes, to merge captures of the predawn fog and frost with captures of the sun as it appeared behind the trees and cast a golden glow through the fog.
Once the exposures had been blended, I used a mixture of Curves, Colour Balance and Selective Colour adjustments to bring out the chilly early-morning tones in the shadows of the meadow, while emphasising the warmer tones on the horizon, which was largely achieved with a low-opacity Colour Lookup set to the Crisp Warp preset and using Soft Light. Contrast and structure were reduced in the shadows using Silver Efex Pro set to Luminosity, as I wanted to keep the scene as natural-looking as possible, but I gently increased the texture where the sun was projecting across the meadow using the Detail Extractor and Tonal Contrast filters in Colour Efex Pro, as this seemed to help draw the viewer's eye along the ground, beyond the tree stumps and on towards the sunrise.
It was important to me to convey the simplicity of the lone bare tree at the centre of the foggy sunrise, so I tried keep the post-processing as inconspicuous as I could. The final change I made was to gently blend in a brighter exposure along a small footpath through the frame, which seemed perfectly aligned as it crossed beneath the tree and continued into the distance where the sun was appearing on the horizon. As ethereal as the scene is on a morning when the parkland is almost deserted, the footpath seemed to add a hint of a human element, leaving a reminder that beautiful landscape and dramatic weather conditions are there to be seen and enjoyed.
You can also connect with me on Facebook, 500px, Google+ and Instagram.